Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  By the time the war came to its end Anna’s chronic ill health, exacerbated by four years of poor diet, made the continuation of her teaching work impossible, and so at last a decision point was reached; but facing it she found that her choice had been already made. On 1 October 1918 she entered her father’s consulting room for the first time as his patient and began her teaching analysis, a culmination of those twin and twisted strands—her ill health, her interest in her father’s work—which had defined her life for the best part of a decade. There were practical reasons for the choice of her father as analyst—Freud’s practice had been considerably reduced by the war so that while the family as a whole had little money, particularly with the loss of Anna’s teaching income, he had an unusual amount of time—but it seemed also by that point already inevitable. This was what they had been slipping towards for years, the two of them working together on their first project, which was Anna’s life, their progress towards it by such slight increments that by the time Anna first knocked on her father’s door it seemed only the obvious thing to do. Anna’s anxious loneliness, her fixation on her father’s attention, and Freud’s fear that in someone else’s care she might be lost to him, left no option but that the two of them turn to one another; and so six times a week for the next four years Anna opened her father’s door and, stepping across the threshold, lay down upon the couch, and together they examined her until, piece by closely studied piece, they had taken her apart and built from what she had been something they could both be happy with.

  * * *

  —

  In early October I sat opposite Doctor K in her consulting room and, finding in the drowsy confusion of unmarked time a sudden point of clarity, I said

  —I want to go home.

  Later that night, waking thirsty and going downstairs for a glass of water, I walked past the half-open door of my mother’s bedroom. From around its edge light spilled, a pale wedge across the landing floorboards, and I heard the sounds of voices, my mother and my grandmother, talking softly. My grandmother said

  —It would help her to talk. I could find someone.

  My mother made a sound which was something like a moan, a tiny, fugitive utterance of distress, and in response to it or in defiance my grandmother said

  —You could stay here. She could start school. Just for a term. She needs—

  —She needs stability, that’s all,

  and there was silence. Moving a little I saw, framed by the doorway so that it appeared as if a picture, my grandmother sat on the edge of the bed with my mother kneeling at her feet, my mother’s head bent forward and my grandmother’s fingers curled into her hair; and I turned quickly, running back up the stairs, because I felt that I had intruded even by looking at an intimacy I had never known them to possess.

  The next morning my mother and I packed my things into my cardboard suitcase and carried it down to sit beside my mother’s bag in the front hall, my coat folded neatly on top of it. We ate lunch, all three of us, at the kitchen table, the sound of the radio filling in for conversation, and afterwards I picked up my suitcase and we said goodbye. My grandmother seemed as she always did, upright, comprehending, but as I turned at the front gate to close the latch I caught sight, for an instant, of her face as she watched us leave, and I did not understand, at the time, what her expression was, that look of long-accustomed shock, a mixture of grief and resignation, but I find myself thinking of it often, now, and wondering if it is inevitable that I, too, will in the future look that way, watching my daughter walk away from me into a complicated life that I can neither simplify nor inhabit in her stead; and I wonder what the alternative might be, and if, in fact, it might be worse.

  * * *

  —

  In the end, during the last few months of my mother’s life, in place of conversation or confession I read to her, picking off the shelves those same books that she had read to me in childhood, for the comfort of it and because it was a way to try and draw a link between us, so that for hours at a time we were engaged in the revisiting of worlds that we had been admitted to before, in a different configuration, when it was clearer which of the two of us led and which followed. While she drifted in and out of a sleep that grew by degrees heavier and stiller, smoothing away her features as though it were an encroaching tide that would leave, at last, nothing but clean sand where her face had been, I allowed my voice to fill the air, keeping out the silence that might otherwise have called to be filled with what I no longer had the capacity to bear. The sentences which grew from paragraphs to chapters kept us both together and apart, creating a shared space in which we could sit, each untouching of the other, but protected and encased. We were peaceful, then. The bedroom had the stillness of a pivot’s turning place; and sometimes, as the evenings bled out into darkness and I found myself still reading, unable to call a halt to the day, my body’s clock unwound by night wakings and the sameness of the days, I would feel as though I were becoming, in word-long increments, disconnected from the moment I inhabited, and that I was at the same time both of us, my mother and myself, stretched out across fifteen autumns, reading: the same book and the same room, the heavy curtains and the patchwork quilt, the view across the garden to where the beech trees reached across the fence. I felt, then, how easy it would be in all this placid strangeness to lose myself, and I felt how welcome it might seem to be; and when that happened I would stop reading and, putting down the book, would step quickly across the carpet and climb into my mother’s bed, and I would curl up next to her, resting my head into the hollow between her shoulder and her collarbone, folding myself inwards as though by an effort of will I could contract myself back into the outlines of my five-year-old self and, doing so, regain all that I had known then: the certainty of place and order, the safety of it, the warmth. Now there are nights when these positions return to me, when it is my own daughter who, climbing into bed at night for comfort, curls up beside me, and I feel my body curve into the shape my mother’s did; or there are the nights of illness when I sponge my child’s face, smoothing damp hair back from her forehead, and I see the outline of my mother’s hands beneath the skin of mine as they go through the ritual of water and cloth, the washing-up bowl on the floor with a balled-up flannel in it, and I hear her voice in mine performing the liturgy of endearments, those sibilant invitations to returning sleep—and I wonder if these things are soothing in themselves or if it is rather that through generational repetition they have become that way, a memory taught and retaught, the epigenetics of comfort; and through these nights which ebb and flow like tides I feel memory as enactment and my mother, my grandmother, in my hands and in my arms, a half-presence, no longer quite lost.

  * * *

  —

  Before my daughter was born I stood once at a wedding beside one of Johannes’ cousins, watching her children run across a stretch of finely mowed grass, gentle Staffordshire hills rising in the distance against a fading sky. I had met her only a handful of times, at such large family events, and we had barely spoken beyond the exchanging of courtesies, but now, separate for some reason from the main party that continued inside, the sound of it spilling out through the mullioned windows of some repurposed country house to further emphasise our remove, we were suddenly intimate.

  —It is,

  she said

  —like having a piece of your heart outside yourself—

  meaning I suppose that a child remains a part of you, vital but detached—but this is not how it feels to me. Rather I think that it is like an amputation, something that was once joined cut off, as unrecoverable now as an object fallen from the side of a boat, drifting on the current further and further out of sight. No longer coming under the auspices of proprioception, that sourceless knowledge with which the body places its own, the lost part can now be seen, it can be weighed and measured, held, but it cannot be felt and cannot be got back. When my daughter throws h
er arms with thoughtless grace around my neck, I respond with an agonising gratitude that I must hide from her in case, feeling the heft of it, she might become encumbered and not do what she was born for, which is to go away from me. It is a balance—to show enough love that she is sure of me but not so much that she stays close: the fact but not the size of it—and it is an effort, as I encourage her to disentangle herself from my gaze, to discard the aching want to have her back—

  Some months ago I went again to Maresfield Gardens and stood in front of the photograph of Sigmund and his daughter walking across a stretch of grass, laughing. Thinking of Anna and the forty years she spent with her father’s room empty at the centre of the house, a still unconsecrated monument she had the keeping of, I wondered how often, amongst the ordinary progress of her days, the comings and goings, the journeys to the library or the shops, the letting in and out of friends, she went inside it, slipping quietly from present tense to past—and if, sitting again on the couch, leaning back against its cushions and listening to a silence which her father’s voice could shape to nothing now, it was him she thought of, or herself; and after all, perhaps, instead of the sad economy of one life poured into another, what their efforts bought them was the miracle of neither having hurt the other, neither having left.

  * * *

  —

  This is the crux of it: that we have no point of comparison and therefore cannot say things would have been better otherwise. I remember how it was with my daughter—how she coughed, and spat, and cried, and after being weighed was passed over to Johannes, who undid the buttons of his shirt and held her slippery, aquatic form against his freckled skin, and how from that moment on it seemed to me that the infinite stretch of possibilities she had started as began to collapse, falling away from our touch to leave behind the emergent outlines of her shape—curious, incautious, kind—and I remember how it terrified me, the suddenly yawning space between what is meant and what is done. Now that we wait to start it all again I find myself wondering if my mother felt as I do, or Doctor K, or if Max Graf did for little Hans or Freud for Anna; and, if so, how they managed to hide it—how we all do: the overwhelming fear of fucking up that having children brings, the awareness of the impossibility of not causing hurt like falling into endless water, and with it the attendant agonising understanding that what success looks like is being left behind—but what is the alternative? Only the unthinkable perfection of a preserved present. Our lives are possibility reduced to rough particularity by contact, touch, and out of it the specificity of each of us comes, so that to ask if we might have been better otherwise is to wish ourselves undone.

  Interlude: Florence

  It is November and I am alone in a hotel room. Outside, an unfamiliar street stretches, empty. It rains a little. We have rented a villa for a fortnight somewhere to the south of here, up in the hills—a place known to us only as a green stretch on a map and a background done in mute regret: dusty slopes planted with cypress rising behind a dozen novels of the English abroad—but we have planned badly and it is the wrong time of year, damp and chilly, mist rising instead of heat above stone terraces, a constant aching mizzle and days to fill indoors. We wanted the sort of holiday that is like a slice of time extracted from the general run of things, and with it a last pass at being just the three of us, a reminder to our daughter that completion is elastic and that she was enough even as we planned her augmentation; but we had things to finish before we could come and then there is the baby to be born when we get back, sometime during the dark and empty days stuffed deep into the gap between Christmas and New Year, so that we could neither come sooner nor wait until in the mountains there might be an outside chance of snow. We must make do with this place caught in the middle of a half-complete moult. For weeks now, oppressed at home by an ever-growing list of things that must be done before the baby comes, by clothes to be brought down from the attic and washed, nappies to be checked over, food prepared in bulk and bedding organised, bills settled, threads tied, as though at the moment of birth time will dislocate itself and these things will not be possible afterwards, I have dreamed of this room, my solitude, an empty stretch. Pregnancy has conferred on me the privileges of old age, an unquestioned pandering to my body’s whims: the flight here was expected to be tiring and so Johannes has taken our daughter on ahead while I am to stay in the city resting before making the remainder of the journey tomorrow, quiet and alone on a tipped-back train seat. By the time I arrive Johannes will have organised things, mastered the geography, bought food, worked out the thermostat, and I will allow myself to be shown these things without taking the trouble to remember, my slight delay according me the status of a guest. For half of each day I will lie on a couch and the pair of them will bring me things: cups of tea, plates of biscuits, tales of their exploits. They will have adventures while I doze and I think that they have been looking forward to it, to their free immersion in those parts of themselves which exist only in my absence. Drifting in and out of sleep on the plane I heard their voices, plotting, their matched heads bent low together, and as we fell through layers of fog towards the ground they laughed.

  At the airport I said goodbye to Johannes and to our daughter, and found a taxi to bring me to the hotel, and although at night, nested in pillows, I am often too uncomfortable to sleep, sat there on cracked vinyl with my legs spread to balance out the weight I do not have time to grow accustomed to, shoulders twisted, I was unconscious at once, and I stayed that way until the car reached the hotel and the driver shook me awake, tenderly in deference to my condition. Now, alone in my room, confused and chilly after the sudden rise from deep and unexpected sleep, disorientated, desolate, I sit down on the bed and start to cry. This happens to me often in pregnancy’s third trimester, these sudden squalls of tears that burst from nowhere as a further reminder to me of how little my body is within my control, and there is nothing I can do but wait for it to end, this excess of emotion let out in salty water—and often it seems that waiting is all I do—for my body to complete the task it has been set, heedless of my intercession, and for the inevitable but unpredictable tract of pain beyond, for exhaustion and those first numb weeks when balance is precarious, the tumbling rush to interpret a newborn’s needs. In the face of such an immediate future I find myself at a loss, those articles of rule over myself and my surroundings which I have so long taken for granted shown up as barely more substantial than a belief in prayer. I have become so accustomed to the doctrine of the mutability of pain, that suffering can be routinely eased, danger negotiated or renegotiated, that faced with its sudden failure I am terrified, as at a world remade, and I am unprepared. It seems such an unforgivable breach of promise to be reduced to flesh from which I cannot, by thought, transcend, but blood and muscle go about their business just the same and in my side something puckers, the sharp retraction of a rock pool creature that has been disturbed—

  After the tears have subsided and I have had a bath that I overfilled because I am not used to my increased body mass, after I am clean again, I go out, wearing over my jeans and sweater the old waxed raincoat of Johannes’ which is the only thing that does up around me now, and which forms a further layer of skin, weather-beaten and familiar, to protect me from my unexpected and abrasive loneliness. I walk with my back arched forwards and my feet splayed out, the soles of my boots slapping against the cobbles like fat flippers. I have a vague direction in mind but I am in no hurry, and I think that this gentle amble and the soft, uninterrupted patter of my thoughts against the bricks is what it is to be alone, or as alone as I can be with a head hard in my pelvis and feet against the low ridge of my ribs, kicking, and I ought to enjoy it, the respite from requirement I have so looked forward to, but instead I feel only a panicky distress, as though I had woken to find a part of myself amputated. I miss my daughter. I have become so accustomed to her shadow falling in and out of mine, to the way she forces my attention outwards, centring my awareness of space on he
r small form, which is at once so sturdy and so breakable, and I am used to the sound of her voice, her constant interjections drowning out the unspooling threads of my own thoughts, her commentary filling the silence where my own has gone astray. I had thought that the temporary removal of these things would be relief, that there would be no sense of loss and that I would not ache, nor feel my hands reach out to touch, to tuck back hair or pull up socks, and find my fingers land on empty air. It is not the first time I have been away. There have been days, nights; but last time she was still fat with babyhood and didn’t have the power to withhold. Then she still hung from me, all mouth and fingers, and treated my presence as an unconsidered right, neither looked for nor enjoyed but only expected, so that to leave was respite, a moment when I could feel myself briefly to be whole. Now she has become something else, a mind inside a body, separate, and it seems to me that the extent of that separation from me is the extent to which I cannot bear to be apart from her. I had thought that I would continue to fall backwards into singularity as to a norm from which my deviation was temporary, and that without her I would be myself again, whole and undivided; but instead I am half-made, a house with one wall open to the wind—