"Anna!" "Anna!" "Hello, Anna!" "I'm here." "Is something the matter?" "The doorbell." "Didn't you hear it?" "No." "I'll go." "Papa." "Mother's gone out." "Aunt Minna's still asleep." "She's not well." "The doctor says she needs another operation on her eyes." "Come." "There was no one there." " But..." " At the front door." "She was like an Amazon." "An Amazon painted by Rupert." "Marthi?" "I'm here!" "Hello?" "I'm here!" " Marthi?" " Minna!" "Marthi!" "We were expecting you tomorrow." "I got fed up with Prague." "In this weather even window-shopping palls." "Oh, how good it is to see you!" " Ah." " Oh, no, no." "Sigmund!" "Now, here we are." " How splendid you look!" " I..." "Eugh!" "I look like a...stalk caught in a thunderstorm!" "And you..." "Let me look at you." "Every inch the man of means." "I've put on weight, you mean." "What have you got in here?" " Marthi, I don't eat lunch." " Nonsense!" "Come." "I know the way." "Oh, I'm used to carrying it." "It's full of books." " How long can you stay?" " We'll see." "Oh, you have put on weight." "A good sign." "You're prospering." " Despite what Marthi says." " Why?" "What does she say?" "I understand we're all your patients now." "Even the children aren't safe from your scrutiny." "She wrote that you're causing a scandal!" " I hope so." " Good!" "I want to hear all about it." "Eugh!" "Horrible old Vienna!" "How can you stand it?" "Our esteemed colleague, the late Maitre Charcot, insisted that a predisposition towards neurosis lay hidden in the womb of heredity." "But this evening I propose to argue that the decisive source lies in a no less mysterious but less remote territory and consists of real events in the patient's own life." "Gentlemen, the predisposition to neurosis derives from sexual shock in childhood." "I, myself, have recently treated 17 cases whereby patient deciphering, the illness can be traced to a sexual assault in their earliest years." "In the main by teachers, nursemaids, governesses." "Saxa loquuntur, like stones, the memories of childhood, mute for so long, speak to us and a thousand-year-old question of the origin of psychological disturbances can, at last, be answered." "Gentlemen, we have found what Charcot sought." "The true source of this many-watered Nile." "My dear Wilhelm, as you anticipated, my infantile seduction theory met with a frigid reception from the society of so-called physicians." "I shall not lecture there again." "In short, my isolation here is now complete and I must gather my forces for a long and solitary journey." "Rather a pleasant prospect were it not for my current state of mind." "My father is failing fast." "At 82, he has little heart for the fray." "This last illness is dreadful to behold and is evoking unforeseen turmoil inside me." "It's as if I've used up all my ideas simply treading water." "And our household has been further shaken up by the arrival of Martha's sister who presents herself as something of a free spirit and regards our settled routine with a humorous eye." "She says I'm growing fat." "She means bourgeois." "If only she knew." "Herr Baumann's entertaining again." "On the stairs I passed the most enchanting creature." "Not the ori..." "Alexander." "If you only knew how I miss the old town and the woods." "Even the mud." "The mud in winter." "Remember the lupina and how a bridge...floods the water?" "Yes." "Promise me you'll make professor." "Even if it means bowing the head." "No matter what it means." "You were a cruel child." "Your mother left me the others." "But I loved you." "Help me." "Sigi, please." "You'll only tire him." "Go away!" "In order to understand, in order to rid yourself of the confused emotions, which haunt your adult life, you must go further back." "Back to a time when your very presence threatened to destroy your parents' love and when your demands made a lover of one and an enemy of the other." "This inexorable family drama returns disguised in adulthood." "A landscape peopled for the grown-up boy by figures of threatening authority and reincarnations of motherhood, as it is for the grown-up girl by jealous maternal counterparts and likenesses of her father." "A landscape of ghosts." "I wet the bed." "Wait there." "It was the first time I'd heard my parents shouting at each other." "I'd come into their bedroom late at night and my father ordered me back to bed." "I could hear them shouting from my room." "I felt a strange excitement." "Fear and pleasure mingled." "Exultation." "Terror." "Mathilde, where's Martin got to?" " I can't see Martin." " He's over there." "Minna, leave the girl." "She's promised to keep an eye on him." "I'll go!" " Martin's run off again." " You'll get used to it." "Really, Martin can be so feckless." "The children seems all right to me." "She was a thoroughly obedient child." "Never stood up to anyone." "I often used to wonder why you chose her." " You mean instead of you?" " Oh, be serious!" "I loved her." "And now?" "Now I'm married to her." "And sooner or later you'll take a cab." "A woman is like an umbrella." "Sooner or later, you take a cab." "That is, if you haven't already found one." "I'm indiscreet, aren't I?" "But you tell me so little." "Oh, they're lovely!" "Put them there with the rest." "Then everyone can enjoy them." "They were for you." "Sigi..." "Do you want your daughter to honor the Madonna?" "I did when I was a child." "It's true." "My nurse was a Catholic." "When my parents were away, she used to take me off to church." "I can still see her squat-ugly bulb before the candles." "Oh, yes, she taught me all about her Catholic heaven and, above all, about her Catholic hell." "And a few other things besides, she taught me." " Oh?" " Until she was dismissed." "For stealing." "That's only something I've recently discovered." "Teresa was her name." "I've been remembering more and more about my childhood." "Including these other things the nurse taught you?" "She filled me with ambition." "She told me I'd become a great man." "And, on the other hand, made me feel very clumsy in a different department." " And you remember all this?" " It's coming back." "I'm beginning to believe that dreams consist of things we've seen in infancy, while fantasies derive from things we've heard and neurotic behavior from the kind of sexual assault" "I'm increasingly concerned with." "Of course, that could all be nonsense, do you think?" "I?" "I should like your sincere opinion." "My sincere opinion isn't worth a damn." "Come." "We've lost the others." "You know what you were just saying now about Martha?" "Mmm." "I want you to understand, it's very important for me to have someone who can bring me back to mundane things." "Very important." "She is the center of my life." "She says she's going to Hamburg shortly, for a week or two." " Mm." " Why?" "I mean, why now?" "Before your father's funeral." "It seems a little strange to me." "It isn't strange at all." "Your mother isn't well." "They haven't seen each other for a long time." "Besides, I'm not very easy to comfort at this moment." "I have no use for it." "You should also understand that... ..certain aspects of my marriage have been fully amortized." "Amortized?" "What a word to use." "It's the word that fits." "Amortized." "Obligations paid on both sides to our mutual satisfaction." "It's perfectly possible to make one's peace with sexuality." "As I'm sure you'd agree." "Where did you learn that song?" "It's Moravian." "Is it?" "While I was a governess in Brune, then." "Possibly." "Have you finished work?" " You don't mind me singing to them?" " Mind?" "I hope you'll stay as long as you want." "I speak for Martha and the children." "You know that." "For you?" "Especially the children." "All the best people have two mothers." "A no less loved and influential foster mother, at any rate." "Leonardo, for instance." "Oedipus." "Myself, of course." "What are you doing?" "You know the story of the bereaved husband who is discovered in the arms of the housemaid on the day of his wife's funeral." "He looks round quickly and exclaims, "Do I know what I do in my grief?"" " Do you feel grief?" " No." "Not even today." "Nothing." "For so long I've felt only impatience and contempt." "Contempt for one's father!" "No grief." "But I still feel as if I've been torn up by the roots." "It's the matter of the way my whole life's been going, not just the loss of Papa." "I feel as if a void is forming around me, professional and personal." "There's no one I can talk to." "Except you and Fliess." "That is when you're not protesting against my obscene ideas." "I don't really believe in your protests." " I think you're quite unshockable." " You think?" "My best memories of him are when I was a child... ..taking me up into the mountains, into the woods." "It was a good time." "But my childhood was peculiar in a lot of ways... that only now begin to fall into place." "Look, my father was old enough to be my grandfather." "He had sons my mother's age." "They had children my age." "Imagine what that means." "She could have been my sister." "Your mother could?" "Well, she was the same age as my stepbrothers." "My playmates were my niece and nephew, the same age as me." "What a topsy-turvy world." "No wonder I felt I was the center of it." "The gravitational force among all those misplaced labels." "A mother, father, brother, niece, nephew all too young or too old for their status in my life." "I was holding them in orbit." "Since I've started studying the unconscious," "I've become an endless source of interest to myself." "And what effect did it have on you, this topsy-turviness?" "When you say your mother could have been your sister?" "It's curious." "I thought you were afraid of your mother." "Possibly." "Is she so frightening?" "What makes you say so?" "Your expression when we go to lunch on Sundays!" "And your stomach aches before we go." "That's because I know her cooking!" "And because you know that she's waiting to hear news of...fresh glories." "All the things your nursemaid promised." "Like any son - unless he's a professor, he's a failure." " You admit that much?" " And when I'm a professor, you'll see." "She'll still cook badly." "I might as well not bother." "What does it take to become a professor?" "Ah, to become a professor... you have to be popular...and sound." "Then if the faculty votes for you, the minister submits the application for the imperial signature..." "..and unless you have this misfortune to be a Jew with obscene ideas, he signs and you get rich." "And does that matter to you?" "It isn't the money." "Do you know why money doesn't make us happy?" "Because we never wished for it in childhood." "It's simple, isn't it?" "All our deepest desires... those that could afford us happiness... derive from infancy." "If not the money... then the fame at least." " You wanted that in childhood?" " I was taught to." "Yes, I shall apply for the professorship and go on applying, if my constitution can stand it." "It's like the old Jew on his way to Karlsbad who gets thrown off the train because he hasn't got a ticket." "They say, "Where are you going?"" "And he says, "To Karlsbad, if my constitution can stand it!"" "You do realize baptism is the ticket." "If I were to join the pitiful crew rushing to the cross, like Martha's Uncle Jakob," "I understand Mahler's thinking of doing it for the directorship of the opera." " I'd rather starve than crawl to Rome." " Oh, I don't know." "You've got a zest for martyrdom, it seems to me." " That's one qualification." " To be Christian?" "You think?" "To be Christ, certainly, but that's quite different." "I do fear poverty." "From childhood." "It's like the wild horses of the Pampas." "I remember reading about them when I was a boy." "Once they felt the lasso around their necks, they retain a certain nervousness for life." "I really did believe this most recent development, the seduction theory would make my name." "Far from it." "Even my patients are nervous of it and self-analysis is hardly profitable." "I have a banker, a distinguished neurotic, who had fled from me just as he was about to re-enact the crucial scenes." "That's what makes it so difficult at the moment." "Trying to complete a map of childhood sexuality with the aid of grudging adults." "If I could make you understand... you could help me." "The whole business is a mystery." "No one's explored it yet." "Literally no one." "I have no authorities to guide me through this jungle, this.." ".primeval jungle... in which, at first, as with the animals, all kinds of sexual zones, which are later prohibited, exert power." "The mouth and throat." "The anus." "In time, we learn to turn up our noses at certain things." "Feces, for instance." "We feel shame and disgust." "Our sense of smell is recruited to this new and moral universe." "The beginnings of repression." "But at what precise stage has never been determined." "I believe that somewhere in this journey through our sexual prehistory, what overwhelms the ego and creates a psychosis, rather than a mere neurosis, is sexual abuse by adults." "Of that much I'm certain." "Unfortunately, my patients' memories are really exact when it comes to the stages of infancy." "My own are equally hard to date." "However..." "If it were possible to investigate children's reactions at different ages..." "How would you do that?" "Quite simply." "It would involve testing their responses." "Without alarming them." "When I spoke to Martha about using our children, she was appalled." "I thought perhaps you might feel differently." "If I understand..." "you mean present them with..." "Feces, say, at a particular age, yes." "Or rather simply observe." "No." "Not while I'm here." "Then I shall have to go on trying to remember." "Using what inspiration I have to hand." "Sing me the song." "The lullaby." "You can't imagine how ugly Teresa was!" "Like some fairy-tale witch." "I've discovered the explanation as to why witches fly." "Can you guess it?" "Their broomstick is the great lord penis." "Tell me, does Martha ever complain?" "When you come away to these congresses of ours?" "Not in the slightest." "Why?" "Does Ida mind?" "Yes...a little." "You look tired." "Why don't you take a holiday away from the family?" "Go to Italy." "I spent the most enchanting time there when I was convalescing." "I don't want to go to Italy!" "Very well." "Did I tell you about a patient of mine, a woman, who persistently hallucinates enormous snakes?" "The meaning requires no explanation, obviously, but I thought that through her case, my idea of bisexuality might shed some light on the whole question of repression." "Yes, indeed." "I've been meaning to send you some novels by C.F. Meyer." "Do you know him?" "The theme of bisexuality is very strong in his work." "Also, of incest between brother and sister." " Oh?" " Meyer, the novelist." "I would say he owes a lot to Nietzsche." "The idea that certain individuals can transcend taboos." "I understand it derives from experiences in his own life." "And it's made me sensitive to certain resonances in my own." "After my sister's death, I simply blot it out." "All my childhood emotions towards her." "Until when Ida came along." "It was like a reincarnation." "Perhaps you'd guessed." "I never felt able to tell you about it." "He, too, makes much of the Italian landscape..." "Wilhelm, I've told you I don't want to go to Italy." "I want to stay here and suffer." "And, God willing, unravel the workings of repression and solve the problem." " By personal suffering?" " If needs be!" "The last thing I want is to be surrounded by more symbols of repression." "All those churches." "Those dreadful saints and martyrs glorying in their pain, all carried up to heaven for denying their simplest instincts." "To love and war and wallow in what life has to offer us." "God knows it's brief enough." "That's all holiness is, saintliness." "The residue of sacrifice." "I refuse to find it beautiful." "What you're talking about is mere piety." "Italian art is one of the wonders of mankind." "What does it amount to?" "Those upraised suffering eyes beneath their halos?" "The disguised blood lust of persecution!" "The persecution of any other race or creed that refuses to join them on their stations of the cross!" "The cross...it leads inexorably to the rack!" "You don't suppose that for once you could surrender to the transcendent beauty of the images?" "Just that!" "Go to Rome." "To Orvieto." "Instead of analyzing it." "Sigi..." "I realize that things are going slowly for you at the moment in the field of theory but if patients are relatively few just at the moment..." "My theory is fine." "My patients are fine." "I'm perfectly all right." "Doctor, it occurred to me since our last meeting..." "You remember the business of my childhood dream about the black fellow I was chasing through a strange landscape and couldn't catch." "It came up when we were discussing how my mother had been unable to make up her mind about her second marriage." "How I, myself, was experiencing difficulty in making important decisions." "Well, I think..." "I think I understand the connection now." "The black man was perhaps a Kaffir and as soon as that occurred to me," "I saw that Kaffir was really, "Que faire?"" "meaning, "What shall I do?"" "Que faire." "Oh, you see, briefly, I had a French nursemaid." "My first love, so to speak." "Who no doubt seduced you." "Physically, you mean?" "Physically, Herr Doctor?" "When I saw the way he treated my brothers, physically, I mean." "The way he sat them on his knee, caressed them." "Whereas with me he was cautious and restrained." "It was left to me to make the advances." "Of course, I didn't know why I was doing it, much less that it was wrong." "And for years I've succeeded in... repressing the memory." "It's only here with you that I can talk about it... without feeling guilty." "It's such a release." "Tell me, am I making progress?" "Marthi's gone to bed." "I've made a serious mistake." "No, more than that." "I've made a fool of myself." "I don't believe in my seduction theory." "My patients do." "They feed on it." "They're manufacturing stories for me, like the devil worshipers they are!" " All of them?" " I don't know." "No, of course not." "But if I can't tell truth from fiction..." "Perhaps I'm taken in by everybody." "Everyone I meet." "It's possible." "For a psychologist, you're a surprisingly poor judge of people." "Hmm." "Yes!" "A poor judge of people." "Yes!" "Quite right!" "No doubt that's why I make it my profession." "Just as poets are often those who find it hardest to express themselves." "I have decided I'm going away for a month." "To Italy." "With Marthi?" "Certainly not." "With Alexander." "Martha doesn't really enjoy sightseeing at my pace." "And the great thing about Alexander is, as a railway employee, he's good at timetables." "Thank you...for being brisk with me." "I mean, about my work." "Besides, it's nonsense." "The seduction theory's perfectly good." "I'm just so tired, I can't even trust my own ideas." "Have you read this?" "It's a novel by Meyer." "Which one?" "Yes, I know it." "You do?" "It's remarkable." "Fascinating subject." "Where are you going in Italy?" "Lago Maggiore?" "No." "No." "To Rome, I suppose." "I don't know." "I haven't decided yet." "But apropos Rome, I have applied for the professorship." "And in Rome I shall be surrounded by Madonnas." "I shall tell myself that, after all, she did belong to our race." "A Jewish virgin." "Like you." "On the bottom left-hand corner of the fresco, dressed in black, we can see standing among the crowd, Signorelli himself, next to Fra Angelico...da Fiesole, his predecessor whose work on the frescoes was interrupted by his death." "Well, that would interrupt his work." "In the next fresco, the Antichrist can be seen performing his false miracles." "It's me!" "Come in." "My God, it's hot in here!" "Leave them shut!" "I'm sick of the sound of bells!" "It must be for vespers." " They'll soon stop." " They never stop!" "Reminding the faithful that every instant is a guilty instant!" "That the end is near!" "That God's church owns them, body and soul, as it does the streets and buildings, even the hours of the day!" "You must learn to put up with it, Sigi." "It'll be worse in Rome." "We're not going to Rome." "Not tonight." "Why not?" "We've booked the rooms!" "What kind of a Jew are you?" "!" "You want to go to Rome to visit the whores or did you want to attend vespers in Rome?" "What's the matter with you?" "You wanted to go to Rome." "Another time, as our great predecessor might have said." "What predecessor?" "How slow you are!" "Our Jewish predecessor." "Hannibal!" "Hannibal was a Jew?" "Of course!" "He was a Semite!" "According to one theory." "When Papa was dying... ..all he could talk about was Freiburg." "The beauty of it." "The mountains, the woods." "Even the mud." "And all I could think of was the day some good Christian knocked his cap off into the street." "We were walking along, the man spat at him... ..and sent his cap flying into the mud." "Do you know what he did?" "I can still see it." "He cringed... ..stepped down, fetched the cap..." "..wiped it." "And came back to me a cringing Jew!" "There, read it." "They've turned down my professorship!" "Seeing them alone at night," "I had no choice but to confess their splendor." "But my Wilhelm, there was nothing transcendental about these images." "Nothing pure or abstract." "Nothing." "I saw, at last, what had been hidden from me for so long." "The scales fell from my eyes when I turned in shame from my own image of the false Messiah to the crucifixion and the grieving women." "The effigies that had pursued me since my arrival here began to speak." "Madonna and child." "Maria Lactans bearing the breast at which human desire and hunger meet." "Pagan images, Wilhelm." "Not Christian icons." "Pagan images surviving like a brazen code." "Mother lust." "The universal longing for the mother." "A universal fantasy." "Had no one ever wondered why the infant Jesus is depicted not as a baby but as a tiny man?" "A supernatural man-child gazing up at the virgin from under fully-formed adult eyebrows?" "Why had it taken me so long to understand?" "It is the child who lusts, like pagan Oedipus, for the sublime erotic union, not the parent who abuses the innocent child." "The lusting infant at the breast..." "was me." "The pagan Antichrist in every child mocking the pious gaze of civilized humanity." "On the journey home from Italy, it must have been in Breslau," "I could see the gas lights on the station and I remembered another journey when we left Freiburg for Vienna." "I was barely four years old." "It was the first time I'd seen such lamps and with old Teresa's stories still vivid in my mind, they made me think of burning souls in hell." "It was on that journey, in fact, that I first saw my mother naked." "And, as I now realize, of course, desired her." "She was occupied with little Julius, my brother." "Poor child, how I hated him." "His death sowed the first seeds of guilt in me... ..which have been flowering gloriously in recent months." "By the time I reached Berlin, I was in a state of high excitement." "Even confusing Fliess with little Julius, my childhood rival." "I gave him short shrift, I'm afraid, but he'll recover." "I wished you could have both been with me there in Italy." "Orvieto was my road to Damascus." "I feel like the founder of a new religion." "They're Etruscan." "Grave gifts." "A family portrait in terracotta." "Do you like them?" "They're beautiful." "And relatively inexpensive." "My dear, forgive me." "It's bath time." "Don't go." "I've got more to tell you." "Best of all, I've come to understand all the distressing feelings towards my father that burst on me when he died with all the force of the unthinkable." "And they were only a mask for a greater long-lost rivalry for possession of my mother." "You see, no wonder Oedipus Tyrannus is the greatest of all dramas of destiny." "Every member of the audience was once an Oedipus." "And it's still there - all around the Mediterranean, in every street and building where the Queen of Heaven is depicted," "Regina Mater...nursing her son." "Can you imagine how I felt for the first time in Italy bracing myself against the banality of the image, shielding my eyes?" "And with good reason." "For there, painted all over Italy... ..was the most primitive, the most licentious of heathen images!" "Not only permitted but sanctified by the Church and venerated by the faith." "It's so obvious, you could miss it altogether." "Like all the best hiding places." "Like the churches built on pagan sites." ""Minna sopra Maria."" "That is Minerva sopra Maria." "It's a church in Rome." "Oh." "And I thought they'd finally dedicated a shrine to me!" "Naturally, I was confusing you with the goddess of wisdom." "I'm coming." "Does it distress you, what I've been saying?" "It's all right for you." "As a mother, your ideas make me feel...aghast." "There's nothing you can do about it." "You may as well feel aghast." "Do you know what Fliess said when I told him about it?" ""Don't let the artist in you overwhelm the scientist."" "I didn't expect that from him." "You understand, don't you?" "We've found the key." "The matrix." "Older than Athens, old as humanity itself, which can revolutionize our image of ourselves!" "After all the sentimental lies and empty piety of the centuries!" "It's my supreme achievement." "A discovery fit to rank beside electricity, beside the wheel." "Nothing less." "Aren't I to be allowed my moment of triumph?" "From what you've said, it seems to me that you've turned all your work on its head." "Now it's the children who are the seducers?" "In their imaginations, yes." "In a passion play, we all try to forget but it surfaces again in every one of our adult attachments." "The mirror of our childhood drama." "How can you know if we've forgotten?" "Because I've lived through it again, been a child again these last few weeks." "In dreams." "In waking dreams, too." "Seeing childhood rivals in my dearest friends, renewing childhood love." "Why do you talk about your feelings that way, as though this were another one of your cases?" "It's my only case." "And I've been astonished to discover how carefully one hides the really intimate things from oneself as much as from others." "It comes to the same thing." "As we grow up, we become strangers to ourselves, to the things we learn to call perversion - the natural things - incest, sodomy, murder." "And are you going to tell the world they're natural?" "Yes." "But not that they should necessarily act on them." "On the other hand, suppose I were to argue that in the absence of God, revealed as a pitiful fantasy, there was nothing higher than enjoyment." "Shockingly immoral?" "More so than virtues for annunciation." "I've seen the rewards of virtue." "They terminate in my consulting room." "The Tarquins prophesied that he would conquer Rome who first should kiss..." "..the mother." "Metaphorically speaking, of course." "I had a dream last night." "I was in Prague." "Not that it looked like Prague but that's was where I knew I was and I was walking with Count Thule of all peopleI" "He had some fascinating gossip to impart about Czech politics." "I only wish I can remember what it was." "Oh, please!" "Tell us later about your dreams." "Not while playing cards." "Especially not while playing cards with Freud." "That doesn't usually stop you." "As Sigmund's the one who never lets us eavesdrop on his dreams." "Yes, very well." "The other day, I dreamt that I was climbing the stairs in a state of undress." " Really?" "!" " That's quite enough!" " 150." " Yes." "I know what Thule was telling me." "It wasn't about Czech politics." "It was about Turkish politics." " Alois, do shut up!" " He was explaining the view that..." "No, no, no!" "I find it interesting." "I have an hour free on Wednesday!" " There you are." " Thank you." " Sigi?" " Hmm?" "Is it true that a patient of yours recently put an end to herself?" "The nonsense people talk had said that you were too busy to see her." "Is that what you've heard?" "I heard that she hanged herself." "Not for the reason you mentioned." "Do you think I'd refuse to see a patient?" "You know me better than that!" "I said it was nonsense!" "The girl was demented!" "Who told you this?" "People everywhere, they're all committing suicide." "At least that's my impression." "It's turning into an epidemic." "Last week, in our apartment, a young chap... cut off his member." "Bled to death." "Apparently, the neighbors heard him shouting, "Nature!" "Nature!"" "Oh, please!" "Pass." " It's an epidemic!" " It's your bid!" "Solo." "Pass." "You know, when I was in Turkey," "I was often struck by their extraordinary attitude to death." "The Turks." "They seem almost totally indifferent to it." "After a certain age, that is." "A sexual life is all that matters to them." " No!" " No, it's true." "Once their active love life is over, as far as the Turk is concerned, his days are numbered." "Apropos numbers... have you read the reviews of Fliess's book?" "The one I saw described it as "a new kabbalah"." "I think his days are numbered!" "Have you read the book?" "I've dipped into it." "You'd have to be a mathematician." "Or a necromancer." "All that numerology." "Provided you make love every 23 days." "More often if you're left-handed!" "All in all, it only lacks a dedication from the Faust." "A distant land awaits me in this secret book." ""From Nostradamus' very hand..."" ""Now shall I read the starry night...?"" "You missed out a line." ""Nor for a better guide I look."" "No wonder, since a better guide is what you lack." "Oh, a significant omission, Sigi." "And it's "starry pole, " not "starry night."" "I wonder why you got it wrong." "Could it be that as an unremarkable family doctor of Polish extraction, as a Pole whose starry fortunes pale into insignificance beside the gifts of Wilhelm Fliess..?" "Oh, come, Sigi!" "Or are you trying to draw our attention to some other difficulty you're experiencing with your own pole?" "Really!" "Is there nothing you won't twist into some scurrilous meaning?" "Nothing perfectly innocent?" "I should have known better than to ask." "No, no." "I often ask myself the self-same thing." "And the answer is yes." "Sometimes." "Even Homer nods." "On certain occasions... a cigar... is only a cigar." "Marthi, I wish you'd come with me." "You know I can't." "You can." "We'll go as slowly as you like." "No more than two museums a day." "And one cathedral." "Alexander swears he won't go anywhere with me any more unless I sign a document promising to catch the appointed trains." "We make appalling traveling companions." "Two berserk wills in head-on collision!" "You can understand why I want to go back before the summer's over and patients start returning, God willing." "Of course." "Go then." "I thought that perhaps since Minna has never been to Italy..." "I haven't spoken to her yet but...if you can spare her." "By all means...ask her."