Secret Dreams Read Online Free Page A

kicked shin, the state doctor remembered
this
Marie and dashed downstairs. He sent the orderlies off and calmed the mother. She must forgive him, he was not such a bad man, “but in our place we see so many children, please understand.” He sighed, then in low tones he told her about the Rostov clinic, “I know the di^ rector—-you can have a letter of introduction….” State doctors weren’t encouraged to refer large numbers of cases there, but in view of how badly the girl’s condition had deteriorated, perhaps the Children’s Psychiatric Institute might do some good.
    When Marie first arrived, the staff thought she was mute. Now free of her mother’s deprivations, nothing changed immediately. But after a week or so she began to eat a little more. And drink. As for her apparent muteness, they all soon learned better.
    Marie was dying of thirst!
    The little girl liked nothing better than sitting in a warm tub half the day, drinking the bathwater as she let it soak into her. Drink the bath and pee in the bath. And then drink some more. After an hour Marie’s skin was puckered and the water smelled a trifle cloying. But Madame, who supervised the child’s bathtimes, solved the problem by opening the drain a crack and letting the tap water flow half a turn. Soon Marie drank from the tap exclusively, the water from her body passing harmlessly into the warm tub and down the drain.
    As soon as her parched vocal cords drank their fill, the inane toneless singing began once more. Clearly Marie sang some kind of mu= sical notes, but no one could place them, they were so garbled, so atonal…. Max alone thought he detected the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
    And then one night, as Madame tucked the little girl into bed, Marie finally spoke two words, whispering them into an empty corner of the room.
    â€œGo away,” she said.
    At first Madame thought the child had cruelly dismissed her. But when she withdrew, the girl’s off-pitch bleating became frantic,- she hacked on till she nearly choked. No, Madame realized … Marie didn’t want
her
to go away. For when the old woman returned to the child’s bedside her frantic stutterings subsided and she let Madame stroke her hair. Snuggling sideways under the covers as she always did when calming down, letting Madame pet her until the toneless singing lapsed into silence and Marie fell into a restless sleep.
    The little girl now ate regularly. Her hair no longer fell out but grew in dark and glossy. And Max had become a favorite of hers, reading to her at bedtime. As he read, her toneless singing dropped to a dull hum. She even played with toys: a doll in a periwinkle-blue cotton dress and a small model tugboat that she took into the bath and sometimes even to bed. At the time she spoke those first words, Go away, they all felt the child had
indeed
come a long way…. When Frau Direktor went back over her case notes, she saw Marie had been with them a year.
    Typically, no one was ready for the child’s lapse when it came a month ago…. One day Marie reverted to silence. All the old troubles reappeared,- she refused water and no longer wanted to bathe. Her eating fell off. Max made the clever suggestion that Marie’s silence was in fact a demand for the opposite — that is, noise, sound. Music.
    Frau Direktor managed to borrow an old phonograph and a slightly scratched recording of Beethoven’s Fifth. Alas, though Maximilian swore he saw a glimmer of pleasure in the girl’s eyes — no real response. A clever idea, but wrong. And Marie worsened…. But when the girl’s case arose for the umpteenth time at yet another end-of-day discussion, it seemed that Madame had finally latched onto something. The old woman had the annoying habit of staring out the window as she talked. Plucking an endless chain of cigarettes from a platinum case and smoking them in a stout,