Shadows of Berlin полностью

This briefly heartens her. She looks up from the cigarette she is igniting, then snaps open the brass table lighter and inhales smoke. “Then what am I?”

“Clinically? You’re depressed,” he informs her, pad balanced on his knee. “So have you been doing any artwork?”

Why is everybody so suddenly fucking interested in the answer to this question? “Why do they call psychiatrists shrinks?” she asks instead of answering.

“Why do?” Dr. Solomon cocks his head to one side.

“Why,” Rachel repeats, “are psychiatrists called shrinks?” She pronounces it, see-­ky-­a-­trists. “My neighbor wanted to know.”

“Why?” The doctor is cooperative. He tries to answer these questions of culture when they arise for Rachel. Such as the difference between Pepsi-­Cola and Coca-­Cola. Why “Go jump in a lake” is not an inducement to suicide. (Ah! As in “Gai kaken oifen yam!” Go shit in the ocean!)

“Well,” he offers, “I suppose the term ‘shrink’ comes from the headhunters.”

Without comprehension. “Headhunters?”

“Yes. You know, in the jungle? Borneo, I think? Headhunters shrink heads.”

Her gaze clouds. “They shrink them.”

“It’s a type of custom, as I understand it. A type of ritual.”

“So are you trying to shrink my head? Is that it?”

The doctor surrenders. “Never mind. I really don’t know the answer to that question, Rachel. It’s a colloquialism of the language. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” the doctor suggests. “Is that why you’re here today? To ask me this question? Would your neighbor like to know why an egg cream has no egg in it?”

Rachel takes in smoke from her cigarette. She feels it circulate in the emptiness inside. “I feel such shame, Dr. Solomon.”

The doctor settles quietly across the room. Patient. Waiting.

“Such shame,” Rachel repeats. “You say I’m depressed. That’s my diagnosis? But it’s the shame I feel. I feel it like a disease. I know,” she says and then must stop. Her voice thickens and her eyes welter. “I know that I am a bad person,” she says. “That’s the truth of me. Oh, I can fool people. I’ve learned how to do that and blind them with a facade. But under everything, I have a diseased soul.”

Solomon shrugs delicately at the weight of the air in the room. “Children,” he says. “Children who are…who are made to feel rejected at a very early age. Even in infancy. They are often vulnerable to deep feelings of shame as an adult. Feelings that attach themselves to the moments of their daily lives. It is quite easy, psychologically speaking, for such a child,” he says, “such a person, to have assumed responsibility for consequences that were actually far beyond any personal control.”

Rachel does not speak.

In the subway, she sobs, the train clacking through the tunnels. No one pays her any heed, beyond a few troubled or curious glances. Another nutcase on the train? What else is new? She doesn’t care. She is beyond caring. The tears are her reward for defending her own shame against the shrink! That’s how it feels.

When she gets home, the building stairwell creaks. Entering the apartment, she is met by the sight of her husband on the telephone, scrunched into the gossip bench with the phone’s receiver tucked under his chin. “Yeah, well, of course you think that’s funny,” he is saying into the phone as he looks up and gives her a perfunctory wave. She looks back at him as she shuts the door. He’s talking to a woman, Rachel can tell. The cozy charm in his voice. For an instant, she feels a bright bite of jealousy.

“Well, of course you think that’s funny,” he repeats. “You’re twice as much of a klutz as I ever was. Ask your mother.”

And then she knows that it’s only Naomi on the other end of the line, which modifies her twinge of jealousy but doesn’t eliminate it. They are so easy together, sister and brother. Siblings, so connected by an intimate language of family that Rachel does not speak.

“Yeah, and what if I get hit by a bus, huh?” he is asking the receiver with a grin in his voice. “What then? What if I get hit by a fuckin’ crosstown bus? She’ll be all yours, baby. All yours! Naomi, for Gawd’s sake,” he scolds, mimicking their mother’s smoky, mezzo soprano, “if you’re gonna use your brother’s urn as an ashtray, then at least set it on the coffee table like a person. I just took the cover off the sofa!”

Rachel breathes in and breathes out.

“And who’ll be laughing then, huh?” Aaron wants to know, now openly grinning into the mouthpiece. “I mean, who gets the last laugh then?” Rachel hangs up her coat, listens as the jokey familiarity in her husband’s voice gives way to the business end of their conversation, now that Rachel has intruded. “Okay, okay, yeah. We’ll be there,” he assures her. “What? Yes. Because I said we would, Red. Look, I gotta go,” he declares next.