Secret Dreams Read Online Free

few bars and then abruptly changed to something else. A few more irritating bars off-key, then off again to a new piece. À chaotic jangle of broken melodies, never singing one long enough to bring out its form, but enough to make one want to hear the rest. Infuriating the way a dripping faucet inevitably drives you mad. Yet occasionally her mother thought she detected snatches of familiar melodies. Was that the first three bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Or something else, in three-quarter time — a waltz, perhaps?
    State physicians hinted darkly at some kind of mental, emotional cause. They prescribed medication, which either put Marie to sleep or made her sing all the more stridently. Travel abroad to seek medical help was out of the question. Though if Marie’s father had been alive, he might have had some influence. As a merchant ship’s captain, he traveled half the year, but had been lost at sea some months before the child’s fit.
    The mother was a pretty, pinched woman — prone to melancholy airs. À wan, pale spirit who could go for days without speaking a word. She frankly told Frau Direktor her marriage with the girl’s father had been in name only. In the months he sailed the Indian Ocean or the China Sea, she shunted Marie from neighbor to neighbor and back again (staying with her “aunts,” they called it), the child spending nights away from home while her mother sought a furtive kind of satisfaction with the men she entertained: men, Marie soon knew, who were not her “uncles.”
    An unbridgeable chasm grew between husband and wife, yawning wider with each voyage. While Marie’s father was away, he was away. And when he returned, well … he slept in the house and ate in the house and went about with his daughter. Alone. The marriage became a noose, slowly strangling both parents with each passing year. Still, they made no break, waiting as couples often do. They were still waiting when his ship went down at sea.
    After the child’s fit, the mother tried to take her daughter in hand. But dealing with a brat who squalls random snatches of melodies went far beyond the mother’s powers. Shouting and threats had no effect; they merely changed the frequency and tone of Marie’s idiotic rant-ings: from La-la-la to Li-li-li, from Na-na-na to Ni-ni-ni. Marie’s mother was reduced to brute force,- she hit on the idea of rationing the amount of water the child drank. Little by little she allowed Marie less and less. No water with meals, no water before bed — just half a glass in the morning. After ten days, Marie drank only the barest minimum required for life. The result: the little girl sang herself hoarse after her half glass in the morning and then went quiet as a church mouse for the rest of the day. At first her mother thought she had succeeded in some way. But soon Marie began starving herself. Her hair fell out, sores appeared on her mouth, her skin went gray. The girl’s clothes hung like limp rags. Marie was dying….
    The mother grew terrified, seeing her mistake. She tried letting the girl have water again, tried coaxing her to eat — but to no avail. Marie kept on as before, drinking little, eating almost nothing. In desperation her mother cornered the state doctor in his office, screaming shrilly at him, “Cure my baby! Cure her, damn you! Do something!”
    The doctor was exhausted from an endless day. Whose crazy mother was this? He had treated dozens of little girls that week already: Marys, Maries, Marinas —-
which
little girl? The tirade grew worse, ranting now — they were all witch doctors, ghouls,- it was the pills they gave her. “Poison! Filth!”
    â€œGet out of my office,” he shouted at her. In moments a pair of meaty orderlies forcibly ejected Marie’s mother from the building. But even as she brawled in the street, with her dress ripped, and one orderly clutching a