"Berggasse 19, I say.
The Freud House?
Who should ask why that?
There's nothing there, believe me.
Wasn't he a coke-head?
My son asks in all seriousness.
And the question sails over the heads of all but Jyoti
who smiles and nods.
The conspiratorial friendship is starting to grow.
Bergasse is very near my labs, should we can
take the tram there tomorrow.
But it's not what you think.
It's just a couple of rooms with photos on the walls.
Boring, Jyoti hums, as my boy suppresses a grin.
We're there at 11 o'clock the next morning, my son and I,
and Jyoti who's brought his guitar along.
He'll do Freud with us, and we'll
do the music shops with him.
He's promised us a tour of the lowlife dives of Vienna.
The coffee shops where the punkers hang out,
the places where he'd spent his high school years
avoiding expectations to be good and dutiful.
The first cousins have gone out for a proper Viennese lunch.
Kaffee-schlag and Sachertorte. Nothing that has to do with the man who once
compared the ego, rational and altruistic, to Europe,
and the libido, rapacious and murderous to Asia,
inspires my wife to sympathy.
A foolish little man racist and chauvinist with bad science
to justify it.
It is a sunny summer day.
Cool but bright, sweater weather.
Children are playing on the sidewalk of Berggasse
outside the corner Apotheke.
That's the drugstore.
Jyoti says to us, watch this.
You think the Austrians know anything?
He asked the oldest boy, do you know the Freud House?
Did they just move in?
Yes?
Get that?
He laughs, turning to us.
My son translates it.
You can ask anyone in the street.
Oh yeah, it doesn't matter.
One group wants to forget, the other never knew.
We cross over the narrow street, looking for the brass plates
outside of the formal doors.
Number 19 is just a flat as it always
was, squeezed between other flats and offices.
Usha was right it's only an old doctor's
office cluttered with photos.
The second cousin's brows respectfully faintly
embarrassed by all the fuss.
It's all Jyoti can do not unzip his guitar case
and start banging out something scandalous for the Freud
Museum.
I don't know what I expected to find.
This is the room where all of them came, I want to say.
Princess Marie sat there and the young Viennese Circle.
See their pictures?
Met here in this room.
In this room, someone challenged the incomprehensible.
Maybe with bad science and bad politics, in the name
nevertheless of reason.
The smallest facts of the deepest gravity.
Chance events were all connected.
Public events with a ritualized form of private projection.
Son, are you listening?
Someone dared to say our dreams had a pattern.
Our dysfunctions, a cause.
Our beliefs, a pathology.
On the walls, the Holy Roman Empire surrenders,
and Freud stands on the dias, Vienna's most honored, most
famous citizen as the Austrian Republic is declared.
Here Freud is welcoming the president
of the republic and his cabinet to the 3/4 century
anniversary of The Interpretation of Dreams.
His birth cottage is decked with bunting.
And it chokes me suddenly, the realization
that science and music and literature can be so advanced
and do nothing to influence a political culture
in its infancy.
Austrian democracy was younger than Ghana's when
the Nazis crushed it.
I want to turn to my son and remind him
of the great despairing poems I read to him of Yeats, of Auden.
The vast literature of the Holocaust
that radiates from this room, and thousands others
like it in the city and echoes off these gray sunny streets.
The tradition however faintly I belong to.
Poems about the imbalance of what
we are capable of feeling and thinking,
and what we have inflicted.
They've gone.
They heard the music outside, the ticket seller tells me.
They said for you to follow the music.
At first I hear nothing.
I watched the children across the street and the old women
slogging their way from shop to shop,
carrying groceries in string bags.
Bergasse slopes downward, and I follow it a block,
half-imagining a rhythm.
A few high notes and a beat in the air.
Turn right twist left.
People are in the street now following something.
Up ahead in a small square of the rim of a fountain,
I can see them.
Clowns juggling and a small crowd clustered.
The performers wear top hats and putty noses.
Their cheeks are reddened.
And one of the boys is darker than all the others,
in a borrowed top hat crouched on one knee like Chuck Berry.
Cutting in front of the clowns and drummers, leading everyone
in lyrics I can't quite understand.
And at the edge of the fountain is my boy in a borrowed vest
and putty nose, punching a tambourine
and doing a snake dance on the fountains edge."