Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 10, Issue 6 Read online

  Sabine

  Lotte

  Lotte. Yes, that would do. It sounded like a lamb, or even a little girl. He saw the corridor down which that thought would lead and closed the door on it. He turned his attention to her, and tried to decide whether she was pretty or not. She was, mostly; luxurious chestnut hair arranged in a coil, with only the slightest patches of grey beginning at the temples; big round eyes, dark and expectant—though perhaps a little too close together; a tiny waist, tiny wrists and hands and feet. And the set of her face was intelligent. That was important. He knew she was educated: fluent in English and French, accomplished at drawing, even an able pianist, though how she managed to stretch across octaves with those tiny hands, he couldn’t say.

  I could cover both her hands with one of mine, he thought. He observed her thin fingers as she fidgeted, the way the bones flickered under her skin.

  He struck a match, lit a cigar and folded his legs. He invited her to tell him about her symptoms, though he knew them all by heart: she woke from dreams sweating and screaming; she had pains in her legs and feet, ‘like nails’, (Christ? he wrote, and underlined). She had violent outbursts, hurling words her mother was shocked to realise she knew. And then some days she lay in bed, not speaking and not moving. But the reason Frau Lang had sought his assistance for her daughter was the most recent development. Franka—Lotte—had started sleepwalking. She had been found in her street, more than once, looking up and down the road. They tried to speak to her. When that didn’t work they tried to shake her awake, but she just stared at them without blinking until they let go.

  ‘Mother thinks I’m hysterical.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I have bad dreams and pains in my legs.’

  ‘Do you think these things are related?’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘Your mother is concerned about you.’ He peered over the rim of his glasses to watch her response. She clasped her hands together.

  ‘Mother has plans for me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m engaged.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  She propped herself up on her elbow, turned, and looked him in the eyes.

  ‘Don’t congratulate me. Congratulate her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mother. Who else?’

  ‘Fräulein, I must ask you to face the opposite wall.’

  She sank below the top of the couch, like a crocodile sinking beneath the surface of a lake.

  He paused. ‘You do not like the young man?’

  ‘He is some trader’s underling. He loves money. And he smells like mould. I can smell him as soon as he walks through the front door.’

  He waited.

  ‘Your mother must think highly of him.’

  ‘She knows what he is.’

  ‘So why have you marry him?’

  ‘In case I don’t marry at all.’

  ‘You are young.’

  ‘I am at the wrong end of young. I am quite young. Or worse, still young.’

  He was gnawing on the cigar. The end had grown soggy. The cigars he smoked smelled different once they were wet. Like fresh manure. He thought perhaps he should find that idea repulsive, but no. It was comforting. He made a note to return to this theme, when it was time to resume thinking about himself. He removed the cigar from his mouth and returned to probing the sore with his tongue. He imagined what it must look like under a microscope, blooming pink and red like coral. He liked to press hard enough to make it hurt. It was a game he played with himself; how much could he press before the pain became sharp and unpleasant, rather than sweet?

  He realised they were sitting in silence. Was she asleep? He flipped open his watch. Their time was up.

  The next time they met, she told him her dream.

  It is always the same, or close enough. I’m at home. It’s overcast outside, but hot—I want to get out of my clothes. They’re sticking to me. There’s no knock at the door but I realise someone’s there. I try to walk but it’s like I’m in quicksand. The door opens—I don’t think I’m the one to open it. There’s a horse with no saddle and no rider. She gallops into the house and through all the rooms. She’s breaking everything, and I look around at all the shattered china and spilled jam, the music from the pianoforte trampled all over the floor, and I keep thinking: I will have to clean this up before Mama sees. Then the horse is chasing me—then I’m on the floor and she rears up over me—but I’m very small and very slow, and I cannot move away.

  ‘It’s strange—in the dream I make no sound, but I wake up screaming.’

  ‘How do you feel, in the dream?’

  ‘Oh—terrified, I suppose. I wake up drenched. Usually I’ve torn the sheets from the bed and tangled myself in them.’

  ‘What does the horse look like?’

  ‘She’s huge—and stout, muscular—her body is round, her legs are thick, like a workhorse. She’s white, or maybe grey. But very pale.’

  Horse, he wrote. His mind groped forwards—horses, momentum, power, force, freedom. Phallus. He frowned.

  ‘How do you know it’s a female horse?’

  ‘I just know it. I can’t tell you how.’

  ‘Where does the horse go? Does she stay in your house, or leave?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I told you. I don’t know.’

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. He knocked on one locked door after another, wondering how long he should wait before shouldering them open.

  Perhaps it was that night, perhaps the next, but soon enough he too began to dream of the horse. He groped for paper and pen as soon as he woke, his blood surging. A pale grey mare. Gigantic. She rears up and she means to crush me. I cannot move. I cannot move. In the dream, he recognised her. They recognised each other.

  ‘Let me explain.’

  He stared at the back of Lotte’s head.

  ‘All you need to do is begin talking. You can say anything you wish. You must not feel inhibited. This is very important. Do not censor yourself at all. Say whatever comes into your head, even if you think it wrong or embarrassing. Don’t leave anything out. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alright then’.

  There was silence. He looked at the parts of her he could see in the lowered light. The points of her tiny black boots. The top of her head, the hint of that mass of hair. One shoulder, protruding from the confines of the couch. His cigar brightened and faded.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s nothing in my head.’

  ‘Don’t think about what to say. Just begin speaking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About anything. Whatever’s on your mind.’

  ‘It’s blank in there.’

  ‘Try again.’

  She paused.

  ‘Can I talk about this couch?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘I can smell the others on it.’ She turned and buried her face in the tapestry throw. ‘Mostly, they’re women. It smells of flowers—lilies, and something powdery, something to cover a bad smell. Perspiration, maybe. Bad breath. Dirty hair.’ She drew a long hair from the weave of the throw rug.

  ‘You see? Too dark to be mine.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Dirty hair, dirty sheets. I hate the smell of dirty sheets. The way they make the whole room cloying. I hate waking in them, tangled so tight between nightdress and sheets that it’s like I’m wrapped in a shroud. Paralysed. I hate how they trap me. I hate the way your sweat changes, becomes potent, when you’re frightened. You stink, your scalp stinks, you stink behind the ears, under the arms… it leaches out of you. I hate that instant when I’m awake but the dream world still feels real, and I’m looking for the threat, but I can’t see it anywhere. And it was just there a second ago. Right in front of my face.’

  There was a faint ringing, some
where under the silence.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on. Don’t stop.’

  After she left, he lit a new cigar and eased it around in his mouth, sucking and puffing. Sometimes the cigar would press the wrong place and a bolt of pain would shoot from the growth up to his brain and down through his arms. He probed the growth, its spongy surface, and soothed it with his tongue. The doctors kept telling him to leave it alone. But some days all he wanted to do was take a razor and slice it off.

  Lotte’s dreams stayed the same for months. He never told her that the horse was in his dreams as well. In one of them, he opened the door of his office and came face to face with the grey mare, breathing hot and acrid into his face, a flood of salt water rushing in behind her. When he woke, drenched, he groped for his paper. English, he wrote. Nightmare. French. Cauchemar.

  And mare—in French—did it not sound like mère, mother, or mer, the sea?

  At their next session, he asked her if she’d ever been to the ocean.

  ‘Never. I would love to go.’

  ‘Many people are afraid of the ocean.’

  ‘Not me. The wide expanse. The deep of it. It goes on forever.’

  ‘Not forever.’

  ‘Maybe not. But further than anyone can reach.’

  ‘Who do you think the horse is? Who does she represent?’

  ‘Nothing. No one. She’s a horse.’

  He paused.

  ‘Can you recognise yourself in her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t see any correspondence?’

  ‘No. That’s absurd.’

  She folded her arms and tucked her feet beneath her skirts. He tapped his pen against his knee, and wondered whether to tell her how, when she was angry, she sounded exactly like her mother.

  When Lotte improved—when she slept through the nights and returned to her piano—a wedding date was set. She curled in a ball on the couch. He told her to speak.

  ‘Soon it will be my wedding day. I will have a dress and there will be a breakfast with fruits and fresh sweet buns and ices and coffee and champagne. I will receive gifts. I will move to a house—to the house he lives in—and I will bear him sons and daughters in a wide white bed and I will be happy.’

  She turned to him.

  ‘The horse dream. It’s gone.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad? I thought you would be… relieved.’

  She curled her hair around her fingers.

  ‘No. You’re wrong. You know, yesterday I picked up a pot of raspberry jam and wanted to smash it on the floor. For no reason at all. Don’t you ever want to just break something? Just for the joy of it?’

  There was a silence. He cast his eye over all the glass and porcelain things he had amassed, in that office—things that were gifts, or that he had collected, and that had gradually become invisible to him. He wondered which one he would break. If he had to choose.

  The next week, she had an appointment scheduled, and did not come. He wrote, and received no response. Later, he saw in the newspaper that she had married, on the date her mother had set. He wondered about the dress, and the breakfast. And he kept worrying at the sore on his mouth—it was getting bigger, no doubt about it. The horse may have stopped coming to Lotte, but she was still coming to him. Sometimes in the dreams the horse had sores eroding its lower lip, big and raw, exposing its yellow teeth. And sometimes she was there too, Lotte, clutching the chaise longue, facing him. In the dreams he liked most, the ones he hoped for when he was awake, the tide took the horse and the girl and all the furniture and ornaments out a door or a window, and they were gone. He could only watch, but he hoped she’d make it to some strange, distant city, or all the way to the open sea.

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