It was difficult to explain the true nature of her journey. After some deliberation, she decided to mention it only in passing: for her fortieth birthday, she would take a kind of pilgrimage in Sigmund Freud’s footsteps. The phrasing drew a ripple of amused smiles around the birthday table, and Alona quietly signaled for her not to elaborate. 

The journey would pass through familiar landmarks: such as the stately house at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, its stone-clad entrance immortalized in solemn black-and-white photographs, with the small butcher shop on the left where Martha once bought beef for roasting. It would also take her to the red-brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London, with its lush garden visible from Freud’s deathbed. But She would trace Freud through the uncharted places as well: his early childhood on the outskirts of Freiberg, the hasty midnight departure for Leipzig, and the cramped Vienna apartments where his family lived after his father fell into debt.

She plans to trace his steps through the narrow streets of Leopoldstadt, past Kosher bakeries and delicatessens she imagines scented with challah-bread and pickled fish, until she reaches the Sperl Gymnasium. Then (here it comes again, this surge of emotion that moves her to tears), she would cross the river on the Salzertor Bridge and follow his path to the university, to the medical faculty his mother had long hoped he would enter.    

“A worthy way of spending a midlife crisis,” Alona said with a delicate smile, topping up everyone’s glasses with a beautiful pink-orange rosé, and tactfully leading a round of toasts, glasses clinking in celebration. Only later, when they stepped outside to smoke, did Alona hug her and remind her that the sheer, indeed phenomenal, amount of research she had done was itself a remarkable achievement; that she didn’t really have to climb the Austrian Alps to visit every inn Freud had ever set foot in, nor subject herself to spa treatments in thermal bath towns that had fallen out of fashion after World War I.     

“But I want to,” she told Alona. “I want to try to get his room in every hotel. I want to sleep in his beds, eat where he ate, exactly what he ate. I just want to be with him.”

Alona exhaled smoke through her nose and said, “At least you don’t feel a national duty to take up cigars.”

 “I’m considering it,” she replied. “And also coke. Cocaine was, after all, his primary research subject – right after eel genitalia and establishing similarities between human and frog nerve cells.”

Alona looked at her gently and said, “I know, sweetheart. I know.”   

For a year and four months now, she had been immersed in Freud’s letters, photographs, and books. It began in the wake of her breakup with Adam, who had left her with a parting gift: a major depressive episode unlike anything she had ever known. Perhaps they had crafted it together: in the end, it was she who clung to his arm with sticky fingers, begged him to stay the night, and then spiraled into even more wretched pleas for him to try to love her, to at least try…

When he left, she crawled into bed swaddled in humiliation and stayed there with the devotion of a cloistered nun. She didn’t shower, eat or change the sheets. Most of the time, she didn’t even feel like crying. She just stared at the ceiling and smoked. Ash settled into the blanket. The plants withered. It all felt right. Her body seemed to shrink inside the clothes she had worn that bitter evening. Then, one morning, she took everything off – the reeking sweater, the underwear, the socks – and lay down like a small, nameless corpse. Strangely, it brought her relief. The next day, she took on a simple copyediting project, just enough to keep her position. She made reasonable corrections without really reading, left her phone uncharged, spoke to no one. She felt no hatred, no envy. That, too, felt right.    

In hindsight, she had underestimated the curiosity of Alona, her upstairs neighbor. Whenever they crossed paths on the stairs, Alona would invite her for a drink and a cigarette on the balcony, always making it clear that the invitation was sincere. These brief encounters were pleasant enough, even though Alona tended to go on and on about how lucky she was to have time off work to finish her dissertation in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies. How foolish it had been not to use the pandemic for writing, and how devastating it would be if, after all the effort, her long-overdue dissertation were rejected.

Now the doorbell rang, sharp and decisive. Through the narrow opening, Alona caught sight of scattered remnants veiled in ash. Alona pushed the door and slipped inside, straight into the threshold of her temple of sorrow. It was as if Alona could see the guillotine standing in the center of the living room, it’s blade dividing existence into with him and without.

After days of silence, she described in a low voice how Adam resisted commitment with all his might, how he refused to call what had formed between them love, even as he embedded himself in her body and soul, how the scraps of affection he offered made them all the more desirable, keeping her on her toes, constantly striving at her best in his presence. And how, despite how he always reached orgasm too quickly for her, she still made sure to appear as though she had never enjoyed herself more. As if completely and utterly satisfied. Idiot.

“Human beings have very specific ways of loving”, Alona said. “One sits with princely serenity at a meal prepared just for her. The other crawls beneath the table, gratefully gathering the crumbs left behind. They both learned this long ago, back in their earliest relationships. A lesson embedded in the mind, quietly shaping expectations.”

That was, more or less, how her romance with Freud began. The image of crawling in gratitude pained her, and yet stirred something unmistakable. Then, it dawned on her: this was not the first time she played the small, anonymous corpse. The realization that every journey seemed to lead her back to this ancient site startled her. It felt both familiar and new, as though she had always known it without quite knowing.

The next day, she opened the windows to let in some air and put a few objects back in their places. She wondered whether, at the very beginning of her life, an unbearable separation had been etched into her. A parting too immense for words, sending out waves of torment like sonar signals. It meant, she gasped in realization, that Adam had been little more than a prop placed beside her guillotine. She burst out of her apartment, taking the stairs two at a time up to Alona’s, and asked her whether it was possible to feel those sonar waves rising and still chart a different course.    

Alona gave her a book with Freud’s early cases, and she developed a soft spot for his patients: young women with undeniably strange symptoms, their inner worlds filled with immense sorrow and wordless wounds that felt familiar. Take Anna, for example, whose peculiar symptoms disclosed that she was drowning in grief for her father, consumed by guilt for being young and alive while he was not. But there were no words for this, she couldn’t even dare think it, and only her symptoms bore witness to how turbulent and lonely she was. Or Elisabeth, who had fallen in love with her brother-in-law. After her sister died, and whilst grieving, the terrible and electrifying thought crossed her mind: Now he will be mine. Elisabeth’s psyche could not bear the weight of that conflict, and only her body gave voice to it through a mysterious ache in her legs, a pain that kept her from running to him or even wandering beside him through the woods.    

Small fragments of truth, pushed away by pain, drifted through the psyche. By day, they surfaced as bodily symptoms; by night, they slipped into dreams. When Freud encountered such a fragment, he dusted it with a fine-bristled brush, examined it under a magnifying glass, and placed it gently beside others. Once enough pieces of truth had been gathered, he assembled them into something that could be known. And she loved him for that.

That was why she began telling Freud about her depression. Meaning exerted a gravitational pull. She described the constant tension she felt in Adam’s presence; not exactly tension, more of a heightened awareness, an elusive sense of estrangement, as if they were never entirely at ease with each other, never truly of the same rank. He lingered on the word rank, and she nodded, saying that in this relationship, Adam had always taken the role of the prince. For weeks she had sat outside the half-closed palace gates, exhausted and hungry, waiting for a sign. An inexhaustible well of understanding and patience, she was nearly willing to draw up her self’s “pros and cons” list to help him clarify. And she had gone down on him for hours, asking nothing for herself. It was enough for her to fantasize that he would realize the depth of his mistake and come running back to her. No questions, no hesitation, just pushing into her, hard; and in that moment, the palace gates opened and she was his forever. How old are you, foolish girl?

But as they spoke about her childhood, she recalled small, shameful lustful sins: dancing for her father in that beautiful slip of a dress, without the dress. Flipping through a crumpled Parisian pornographic booklet, found wedged at the back of her parents’ closet. Never admit it. Lying naked on a tiny mattress in the living room, in the sweltering summer, the wind from the fan came and went, caught for a moment on a fingertip dampened by her mouth, by her cunt, by both. Fishing out all the cherries from the ice cream and leaving only the plain, lifeless vanilla, then smoothing the surface so no one would notice. Never admit it. You were so little, but no one thought it was clever or funny… Or the time when, desperate for sweetness, you sliced a crushed orange forgotten in the fridge, poured an obscene mound of sugar over each half, letting the syrupy gold drip down your chin, staining the school shirt completely. What are you doing? Who eats oranges like that? Why must you act so mad?    

Through his eyes she saw, with clarity, how she became the girl who is too much. If you’re so greedy, ravenous, inconsiderate and bad, you must restrain yourself. Beware of the thing that slips out through your red lipstick, through open buttons worn in defiance. The Taming of the Shrew, she murmured as, inside her, bitter waters surged. What will happen if she dares to follow the river of rage all the way to its source? If she dares not divert its current?   

Alona gave her the numbers of two psychologists who were also psychoanalysts, both highly recommended. She was brave and said outright that she couldn’t let anyone come between them. She had long since been bound to him by unbreakable ties of love: to his intense gaze, to the neatly groomed beard framing lips that released sharp words. The fact that he lived in another place, another century, the fact that he was no longer alive, did nothing to diminish his presence.    

She read to feel close to him, devouring Alona’s library with chaotic passion, skipping freely between cases and eras, moving back and forth across his body of work, clinging to every footnote in his meticulous correspondence. She ordered an old photo book by Edmund Engelman on eBay, the one with photographs of the house on Berggasse, Hill Street, taken just days before his escape to London. Alona was truly excited about the book, and they spent hours leafing through it together, their heads pressed close like children sharing a secret, Alona’s curls spilling over the straight tips of her hair. The photographs showed a spacious apartment filled with books, plants, and embroidered cushions, and they imagined themselves in every inviting corner. The clinic looked like a museum of antiquity, they ran their fingers carefully over the figurines, reliefs, and paintings. She pictured herself nestled softly on the couch with the oriental rug, the stove radiating a gentle heat, while he sat behind her, sunk into his armchair, feet resting on a footstool.

Five patients after breakfast. Lunch served precisely at one. He despised cauliflower and chicken, loved strawberries, mushrooms, and artichokes, and had a fondness for homemade vanilla ice cream. After lunch, a short nap on the couch, sometimes a brief walk: visits to publishers, the tobacco shop, antique dealers. Then coffee, and back to seeing patients until the evening. Then, to the endless tasks of revising manuscripts, preparing lectures, replying carefully to every letter. She stored countless details in her mind: that he longed for Italy but feared traveling alone, that he wrote during long summer retreats in Karlsbad and Semmering, that he enjoyed the theatre, sang off-key, adored the singer Yvette Guilbert, who played “loose women” in the cabaret.

“The two pears – pommes ou poires – are the breasts of the mother who nursed him; the window-sill is the projection of the bosom […] ‘Mother, give (show) me the breast again at which I once used to drink’”, she reads to him from The Interpretation of Dreams.[1] She loves it: the old world peeking out at her from its pages, a world where a single slip lay hidden in a mother’s lingerie drawer, a trace of lace beneath a pile of sagging underwear. Would he know why she searched for the slip, found it, put it on without permission, inhaled its lingering scents, and dreamed of its secret adventures? Would he know why, afterward, she tried with all her might to be good, even though it was already too late? She told him that nowadays a slip is considered a legitimate outfit, meant to be worn outside, without secrets. He was surprised.

Just before the trip, they had a serious argument about Dora. Dora was a fascinating patient: not only did her body speak through symptoms; her psyche was beginning to give form to an unutterable truth. Dora was gloomy and coughed incessantly, as if something was lodged in her throat. She told Freud that a friend of her parents tried to touch her while walking by the lake during a family vacation. She demanded that her parents sever all ties with the man and his wife, but he denied the incident, and Dora’s father believed him.

At some point during sessions, Dora realized that her father was having an affair with the man’s wife. A horrifying thought struck her: had she been sent to him as a distraction from her father’s affair, a kind of consolation prize? She also recalled that two years before the lake incident, the same man had hugged and kissed her, and that it had made her feel sick. How long had these dreadful exchanges been going on behind her back?    

Freud believed that, unconsciously, Dora desired the man and was wounded by his denial of what had happened by the lake. Beneath it all, he surmised, lay her childish love for her father and a longing for him to choose her over his affair. But Dora could not accept this interpretation, it twisted every motive and recast it against herself. She insisted she could not recall ever feeling any attraction to the man, but that only confirmed Freud’s theory of repression. There was something deeply unsettling about this treatment: he had devoted his life to finding words for the suppressed truths of silenced women, and yet with Dora he waged a brutal boxing match.

Dora stood alone against her father, the master of omissions and schemes; against the lying man; against his wife, whom she had once hoped might be her friend, perhaps her lover; and finally, against her own psychoanalyst. “She stood before all of you and spoke the unspeakable truth, and you had no idea what to do with it, so you tamed her like a shrew!” she shouts. “You know what? I’m glad Dora left you!” She calls out for all the Doras of the world, generations of Doras,[2] for the witches, for the hysterics, for all of the women who wanted to leave.

What did he think? that she didn’t already know all of this herself? The uncle whose arms lock around her like pliers, kissing her too close, too damp; count to three in your head, and it will be over. Next time, be busy in the kitchen when he arrives. How lovely, such a helpful girl, but why didn’t she come to greet the guests? The old lecher even has the audacity to be offended. Everyone must have noticed how happy he was to see her. There’s no way she’s the only one who saw. Did her father see? Did Father see? Is she just another item on the dinner menu? And then, more secrets, more lies, a stolen slip which she will never return. A cunt opening and closing beneath the blanket. The smell of her fingers. The taste of herself. If you come really hard, you have to check right away that you didn’t use up all your orgasms. Is there a set number of orgasms allotted to each of us? Good news: there are plenty. Why can’t you calm down? What’s wrong with you? Everyone can see, or smell something, something from your body.

And so, they set out on her journey. When they arrived in Vienna, their first stop was 19 Berggasse. He regarded the line stretching from the ticket counter with a measure of contentment, but preferred not to go in himself at such a crowded hour. They walked along the Ringstraße, following the route he once took on his long evening strolls. He tired quickly, so they stopped at Café Landtmann near the university. She ordered plum-filled dumplings, soft little hills wrapped in warm butter and toasted nuts, dusted with a snowy layer of powdered sugar. He sipped lukewarm coffee, even this pained his mouth. She tried to savor her dessert politely, but when her spoon reached the crown of whipped cream atop the hot chocolate, a moan of pleasure escaped her, making two elderly women with violet-tinted hair turn to look. He smiled at her, and she asked, “Do you remember writing to Martha, ‘It’s simply inconceivable that cookies can taste this good?’ Do you remember writing to your family, ‘In recent years, I’ve been discovering a talent for life’s pleasures?’”

The next day, they returned to 19 Berggasse, but this time he made no effort to hide his sadness. “Most of the things are in London now,” he said quietly. “You can’t deny the ending.” To lift his spirits, she began listing the places she still wanted them to visit together: in Vienna – Café Kurzweil and Café Korb; in Semmering – the Archduke Johann Inn, though she had read it was destroyed in World War II; and, of course, the sweet yellow Villa Schuller, immortalized in a painting by Koloman Moser at the Leopold Museum. Ah, she had almost forgotten Room 18 in Villa Excelsior in Bad Gastein. He seemed to age by the minute.

On a better day, they took the train to the spa town of Karlsbad. The journey was long and breathtaking, though it was clear the effort was beyond his strength. When they arrived, he asked to sit on a bench in a small garden he used to frequent. They gazed at the grand colonnade, where tourists strolled back and forth, filling porcelain cups with elongated spouts from the warm mineral springs. Pale and exhausted, he had not lost his sense of humor, remarking on the sight of collective suckling at the curved spouts. He had come here every summer from 1910 to 1915, and at the entrance to Hotel Rudolfshof a metal plaque now announced: Sigmund Freud Slept Here. He found it terribly crass, but they went to see it all the same.

“I’m tired,” he said when they returned to Vienna. “I’m slowing you down. I, and your parents, mistakes included, are no longer young.”

“No,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Do you remember writing, ‘Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful, and so is love’?”

“Of course I remember,” he replied. “But one cannot ignore the fact that a pause is forming here. What I meant to tell you is quite simple: a locked palace, even if only partially closed, is not necessarily a great palace. Perhaps the opposite. What about a palace thrown wide open? A palace glad to receive you? What about a palace of your own? After all, there was once an ancient palace where the princess rested, present and at peace… And one more thing: Think your own thoughts. They don’t become any less true because they make someone uncomfortable. Perhaps the opposite. With lipstick, without lipstick – they will manage. And for heaven’s sake, my child, choose your tobacco wisely.”

In her own palace, she lay naked on a mattress in the living room during the sweltering summer. Alona regards it as a sacred habit, no less so than dancing without a dress. Lying on the mattress, like the child she once was, she listens to the simple murmurs, the play of shifting movements on the walls. Lights ripple across the ceiling, a cunt opening and closing, her scent, her taste, Alona is climaxing in her arms.

[1] “The Interpretation of Dreams”, 381. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, The Modern Library, New York, 1938.

[2] In Hebrew, “generation” means “dor”, creating a fitting link to “Dora”.