He placed a glass of sugar water in front of her. Dr. Hoffman pointed over to the cabinet with his eyes, and Hamdija took out a bottle and two brandy glasses. Regina tried with all her might to keep a straight face so she wouldn’t burst into a sobbing mess.
“Have a drink, ma’am; unfortunately we haven’t come up with a better medicine than brandy!”
Hoffman downed the brandy that Hamdija poured for him and shook like a shaggy dog coming out of a lake. His every hair stood on end, more from fear than anything else, because he knew that Bepo Sikirić wasn’t going to be dissuaded. And that was Hoffman’s choice: either he could wait for them to put him up against the wall, or he could pass judgment on himself.
It occurred to him to give himself an injection of morphium; there’s no nicer way to die than with morphium, if any death can be nice. The older he got, the more he wanted to live, and the fewer reasons he had to die. At one time he’d been ready to die for his emperor and king and flew into such a rage at those who’d killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the Latin Bridge that the next day he enlisted as a volunteer in case Vienna decided to punish Serbia militarily, but his enlistment papers got lost somewhere and no one called him up for the army when war was finally declared. They probably figured that a psychiatrist wouldn’t be much use on the front or might even damage the combat morale of the regiment.
Soldiers don’t think about their souls, nor do officers think about the mental health of their soldiers because if they thought about such things, no one would ever fight wars.
Well, it wasn’t just the assassination in Sarajevo that had inspired Franz Hoffman to die for a higher cause! Four years later, when the empire went to hell, Bosnia was in the grips of hunger and misery, and anyone with a Kraut name and surname was looking to pack up his things and leave for Vienna, he slammed his fist down on the table: “One doesn’t abandon a people who have accepted and fed you! No, not when the people have got it bad.” He turned around, and without saying anything else, he left the meeting that Professor Ernst Erlich, the retired director of the Land Bank, had convened at his villa at Vrelo Bosne; this meeting was supposed to decide on an SOS letter that they were going to send to Vienna asking the royal palace not to forget its sons and daughters imprisoned in the Turkish provinces, not even in those times, which posed the greatest difficulties for the people and the crown. He never saw most of the people at Erlich’s villa again, and he hardly ever greeted those who stayed in Sarajevo.
He no longer wanted to have anything to do with Austria, the Austrians, or his German roots. A new state was being created, a great kingdom of the South Slavs, in which Hoffman had decided to be a Slav by his own choice. A few days after Serbian troops entered Sarajevo, he heroically stepped into the local registrar’s office and asked a scowling Serbian officer to Slavicize his name and surname on the spot. But since the latter was only half-literate or at least fairly sloppy, he simply entered the name Franz Hoffman in Cyrillic script. Thus he became only half Yugoslav, whereas half of him remained what he’d been before. But that didn’t bother him: “If our King Petar the Unifier ever needs a good warrior, you can always find me in the sanatorium for the mentally ill in Jagomir!” he shouted, stepping right into the face of the officer. He thought that was necessary and that shouting was a Serbian folk custom because all the Serbs he’d seen in recent days had been hollering at the top of their lungs. Hoffman didn’t connect that with the fact that every one of them was in uniform and that he’d never seen a Serb in civilian dress because before the war they’d only seldom crossed the Drina and came to Sarajevo only very rarely. Or maybe he’d seen those people, but didn’t know they were from Serbia. Somehow he thought that they had to be very different, cockier than Bosnians.
“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, you shit; you want me to tie your ears in knots?” the officer replied in an even louder voice. Hoffman ran out of the office and couldn’t understand why the officer had gotten angry at him.
It was a good time; one’s soul didn’t cramp up from hardship, and there were so many things to be happy about and for which it paid to have courage. Afterward there wasn’t a single one. Whether this was because people were getting older or because the times were topsy-turvy, this was something that Franz Hoffman often wondered about.
And the worst of times—times of mental unrest, depression, and dyslexia—began for him on the twenty-eighth of February, 1933. He was sitting in the café of the Hotel Europa; outside it was snowing. In the corner someone was playing Mozart on the piano. It was approaching noon and the regular patrons were already starting to go home for lunch when Hoffman opened the Belgrade Politika and on the third page read the following headline: “Reichstag Burns to Ashes and Cinders! Chancellor Hitler Accuses Communists and Social-Democrats!” There had been even worse news that he’d read in the newspaper, but none had ever worried him like this. A heavy stone, like those used to press sauerkraut in crocks, fell on his stomach. He began to gasp and couldn’t get enough air. “This is panic,” he thought, “female hysteria, or arrhythmia.” He checked his pulse; his heart was beating powerfully and regularly. He folded the newspaper and looked at the wall for a few minutes.
“Are you all right?” asked Rudo, his waiter. When he calmed down a little, he opened the newspaper to page three, and had the same reaction. As soon as he came home, he told Tidža to pack their bags; they were going to Opatija for a vacation because his work and the patients were driving him crazy. They stayed in Opatija for three weeks. He didn’t read the newspapers or listen to the news. They went for walks by the sea and went to concerts every evening, listening to hit songs, both Strausses—the older and the younger one—Russian romantic songs performed by an ensemble from Novgorod . . . But Hoffman didn’t become himself again.
When he returned to the asylum, he told the head doctor, Đuro Sandić, that he thought he was starting to have mental problems and asked for permission to go visit Dr. Freud in Vienna. Đuro roared with laughter and turned as red as a tomato, fat and stocky as he was. He liked Franz, though he would get a little irritated at his innovations and all that idiocy that he picked up from the literature in Vienna and London, where they were making a philosophy of psychiatry: “It’s as if mental patients, God forgive me, are smarter than mentally healthy people, who have to find ways to outsmart them.”
Head doctor Đuro was a good and generous man and genuinely suffered the agony of his patients, even more than Hoffman had ever done, but he believed that there was simply no better treatment for severe mental conditions than cold water and electroshocks.
“My good Franz, you need to give your head a good shake-up, and maybe things will settle in the right places. And maybe not. But no benefit will come of all the talk and hocus-pocus that your phonies write about,” he explained to Hoffman when he’d arrived in Jagomir full of enthusiasm about an article he’d read on psychoanalysis.
He tried a few more times to convince head doctor Đuro about the advantages of modern methods of treating mental illnesses, but he would always laugh at him or act as if he were angry. He made phony threats about dismissing him and turning him into the ministry in Belgrade. But when Hoffman came to him with his tale of how he was starting to have mental problems himself and that he would end up as a patient in his asylum if Đuro didn’t let him go to Freud in Vienna, his boss couldn’t stop laughing. He thought that he would suffer a stroke; his lungs were close to bursting, and he was already hot in his heart and belly. No one had ever said something so silly to him with such a serious expression. It was as if Franz were a small child and was imagining that he was sick only so that he would let him go to that Jewish good-for-nothing. Of course he would let him go! The young man could have his fun. There wouldn’t be any harm in it, and it was better if the subordinates were content, especially Hoffman, to whom he was going to leave the clinic when he retired.
“How long do you want to stay in Vienna, you damn sniveler?” Đuro asked him, holding his belly.
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“A month, if at all possible,” Hoffman said, ashamed. His boss was around fifteen years his senior, but he acted as if he were his grandfather.
“Here, take three months, but come back healthy! And don’t think of coming back here and pestering me with whatever that fool fills your head with because I’ll pack you off into an isolation cell and electroshock that psychoanalysis out of your head. Watch out, Franz, my pops slept with wolves on Mt. Vlašić, and I’m no better! There’s no touchy-feely with us peasants!”
Hoffman wouldn’t understand the part about no touchy-feely until much later. It was as if Đuro hadn’t let him go off to Vienna to see Freud because he was a good man and because his lies (or what he thought were lies) had made him laugh but because head doctor Đuro figured that there couldn’t be too much harm in those innovations. And there might even be some benefit when later people around Sarajevo and throughout the whole kingdom told how he, Dr. Đuro Sandić, allowed the spirit of Freud into the Jagomir clinic. If it were all foolishness, as he thought, it would be easy for that spirit to head for the hills, but if there was something to that damned psychoanalysis—which Đuro wasn’t going to get caught up in even if it were true—then his name would be inscribed in gilt letters in the annals of Bosnian mental health, and his frowning bust would stare out in front of the Jagomir asylum. He was already proud of that bust, regardless of the fact that its bronze head wouldn’t look anything like him and that it would show generations of mental patients how lucky they were because they hadn’t fallen into the hands of such a gloomy man. No matter how little he cared for earnest posturing and was always playing the clown and teddy bear as he laughed and joked with his patients, superiors, and subordinates, head doctor Đuro envisioned his posthumous role as a serious and scowling one.
But even without that, and if he’d been one hundred percent certain that Freud was a complete idiot, he would still have let Hoffman go. One should never keep others from what makes them happy without a compelling need or reason. Head doctor Đuro didn’t believe in God, but he believed that something like that would have been an unforgiveable sin.
Franz Hoffman lost seven days waiting for Freud to see him. He already had the impression that the doctor was avoiding him and had started worrying that he would be forced to try to solve the problem of his obsession with the newspaper headline of the twenty-eighth of February on his own or, maybe, get used to the fact that overnight he’d become a coward and that there was no longer any ideal that was more valuable than life.
Actually, in those days he couldn’t remember a single ideal that was worth anything at all. Maybe that was one more oriental influence, he thought as he shambled through the streets of a city that had once been his. Maybe years of living in the market-square district and among its people had turned him into just another little hodja or shopkeeper, into a man who didn’t want to look farther than his mosque or his shop front. But how could that happen to a Kraut who was born far from Bosnia, Islam, and everything that makes oriental Slavs so passive and obsessed solely with their own trivial human pleasures? It would have to be that this was a case of some strange neurosis, a mental disorder in the broadest sense of the term, about which Dr. Freud could certainly tell him something.
On the eighth day he saw him going into the building in which he had an unregistered practice; he ran after him: “Doctor, Doctor!”
Freud didn’t turn around; he was probably lost in thought, or he was pretending not to hear. Hoffman stopped him on the steps just when Freud had ascended to the fourth step. He looked at him in surprise, trying to remember whether he knew this man, and that glance from up above—because Hoffman was standing down on the first step—was like a revelation for Hoffman. He felt as any old woman from Kraljevska Sutjeska with a tattooed cross on her arm would feel if the Pope had received her in the center of Rome.
He started babbling something incoherent, saying that he’d come from Bosnia but that he’d studied in Vienna and was a native Viennese and had been working for years in a Sarajevo mental hospital and begged the doctor for a bit of his precious time—he wanted him to give him some directions and advice and maybe some help in solving a strange mental problem.
Freud was probably in a dilemma: should he run or maybe chase this troublemaker away or talk with him regardless? An interest in various psychiatric conditions that define a person is not at all the same as an interest in street characters and troublemakers. And this guy seemed to be just that. It was hard to get rid of such types. The reason they approached you in the first place was because they felt that you were incapable of telling them off.
Hoffman told Dr. Freud what had happened to him. He listened without moving or changing his expression. He seemed tense, like someone who’d been suffering from an ulcus duodeni since the spring and would suffer from the pain for days at a time. When Hoffman finished, Freud continued his silence. Probably because he hadn’t been asked a question, and Hoffman couldn’t actually come up with a question for him. He squirmed like a student who had an idea of what a professor wanted to hear from him but didn’t dare speak so he wouldn’t blurt out something stupid.
“Are you a Jew?” Freud asked quietly.
“No, I’m an Austrian and a Catholic,” he answered and immediately realized that he’d said something inappropriate. As if a Jew couldn’t be an Austrian.
But Freud didn’t catch that at all.
“Are you sure? Maybe some grandmother of yours is nevertheless Jewish? Or a distant ancestor?” he asked insistently.
“No, really none of my family are Jewish. My ancestors came during the time of Maria Theresa to Vienna from Swabia. They were Lutherans and converted to Catholicism. But what does that matter to you?” Hoffman asked, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
“If you’re not a Jew, and it’s clear that you’re not a communist, I don’t know why the burning of the Reichstag hit you so hard personally. And I don’t know why you think that I might be able to answer your questions.”
Dr. Freud continued making his way up the stairs, and the conversation was over.
Franz Hoffman left Vienna deeply disappointed. He continued to believe that the doctor was a genius, but he couldn’t forgive him for that insult. Freud left him alone in the world, never again to find someone in whom he might confide his fears and weakness. After he’d lost Jesus Christ as a boy, the loss of Sigmund Freud was for Hoffman the loss of his last link to divinity, what was beyond man and served as a support for his courage. And that was his final farewell to his home city.
Before he descended from the one step that he’d ascended, he’d already forgotten his imaginary mental illness and accepted what until then had seemed to him to be completely beneath his dignity. Yes, he’d become a coward. He was frightened as old people are frightened and those without protection, rich relatives, or a secure place to call home.
He stayed in Vienna for two more days, visited a few bookstores, stood for a while in front of his childhood home and looked into the windows, behind which some strangers were living.
Head doctor Đuro was surprised by Hoffman’s early return but didn’t ask him any questions about it, nor did he make any jokes at his expense. He never asked him what had happened to him in Vienna, and so the story of Hoffman’s mental illness that could only be helped by Sigmund Freud could be forgotten.
The months and years following the newspaper headline that had changed him were a part of the general conspiracy of fear. There was a prolonged bloody war in Ethiopia, the League of Nations ridiculed Emperor Selassie, the junta generals from the Canary Islands began their attempt to destroy the Spanish republic, Hitler annexed Austria, Vienna became a German city, and there were articles about laws that curtailed the rights of Jews in Germany. In the Belgrade assembly representatives of all three Yugoslav tribes could be heard saying that the same or similar laws should be passed in their country . . .
Franz Hoffman read all that—a mountain of leaden letters that forbade him from t
hinking about anything other than what he might see in the newspapers. He stopped going to Mt. Trebević, Mt. Jahorina, and Mt. Treskavica with the mountaineering society, and he refused invitations to Sunday card games in the Two Bulls tavern. And so soon he no longer had anyone to spend time with apart from his patients, head doctor Đuro, and his wife Tidža. The lax pace of oriental life, which he’d appreciated for years and in which his Viennese principles had sunk without a trace, now turned into a depression that he felt within himself and saw all around him.
In the summer of 1939 head doctor Đuro was forced to retire by law. He left Jagomir in tears, after sending several letters to the royal regent, Paul, and the presidents of the royal governments requesting that an exception be made and his retirement age be raised because his experience was necessary for the clinic, its staff, and—what was most important—its patients. Hoffman countersigned each of Đuro’s letters and knew they wouldn’t help. But at least he preserved his unhappy boss’s faith in loyalty and friendship.
The last letter, sent three days before the decision on his retirement would arrive from Belgrade, was signed by everyone: stokers, porters, cooks, nurses and doctors, and even patients who were literate and lucid enough to sign. To no avail. No answer ever came in response to that extremely unusual petition. For two months head doctor Đuro came to his clinic as a retiree, and with the first autumn rains he disappeared. Hoffman didn’t even see him at Sunday coffee in the Hotel Europa.
In the early autumn of 1940 he would learn from one of Đuro’s relatives that the head doctor had died three months before and that the funeral had been as for a real pauper because according to the deceased’s wishes no one had been informed of his death, nor was the news published in the newspapers. He was buried in the Orthodox cemetery in Mrkonjić Grad. After the war Hoffman went to find Đuro’s grave. He thought that the clinic should have an appropriately dignified tombstone made for its long-serving director. But there was no grave, and as the registers of the dead had burned and Đuro’s family had scattered all over the globe, there was no longer anyone who might know where he lay, that man who’d secretly dreamed of his bronze bust, for the sake of which he’d been ready to allow psychoanalysis into his clinic.
The Walnut Mansion Page 27
