The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
began that spring with two hours a week, usually meeting late in the afternoon, sometimes going beyond the hour which left me racing home defiant in my girlish euphoria, determined to keep my secret, but just as fearful that I would miss the evening meal and be caught out. I remember starting each session, sometimes sitting at the desk with Gillot in the high stool at the window or other times, particularly when I was upset with something gone wrong at home, sitting on the edge of the cot. Occasionally I leaned back onto the pillow while Gillot remained at his desk. I would begin by closing my eyes and relate to him all the stories and fantasies that had intruded on my days since our last meeting.
When I think back on those early days, this truly naïve invention of ours—what Gillot called our “Märchenstunden” was not unlike analytic inquiry today. Our “fantasy hours”—unscientific and spontaneous as they were—were all part of a game within which I could speak my foolish fantasies freely, without fear of reprisals.
The idea for me was to “relieve myself” of my menacing fantasies, to get rid of whatever impelled me to make them up, but what Gillot’s presence actually caused me to do was to embellish them with new twists and turns occurring in the moment. I did this because in dramatic moments I opened my eyes for a second and saw a faint smile on his forgiving face. He was intrigued by my creations. They clearly pleased him, as his full sensuous lips curled and parted as if waiting for the next breath of my story. So I did all I could to prolong the fantasy part of our lessons, if only to delay what followed: our actual studies.
Gillot would embark on longwinded discussions of the history of philosophy—man’s notion of what God might be—the one true god—and the history of religion—which as far as I could see was God’s notion of what men should be—the one true people. But how many gods and how many chosen people? The only common ground of these multiple faiths seemed to be in the claim of being special—one and only.
Gillot was translating a history of religion from his native Dutch into German and I struggled fiercely to teach myself Dutch on off-hours and during the two-month summer recess when my family retired to our summer home in Peterhof. My job during our lessons was to help him find the precise German rendering, as he worked himself through the original Dutch text. A drudgery I couldn’t quite follow, because it seemed so predicated on a literal interpretation of the word.
It seemed to me disingenuous—God’s word having been handed down through countless generations in multiple tongues, no telling how many translators being just like me, each one unable to curb their inclination to add a little here and there, to satisfy their lost spirits. Their lives were dull enough and here was diversion. And if Gillot’s exactitude was typical of a scholar’s formal precision, what then of the Luther-inspired personal God with a written word and scripture, which the faithful seeker not only had complete access to, but could even interpret and make his own, indeed improve upon? What of the words that truly spoke to the soul?
Oh we displaced all that passion percolating just below the surface into exacting God’s word. Silly as it sounds, we did. Only much later would we have words for it—“repress,” “sublimate.” I couldn’t begin to question what happened in that space. He, my confessor and I, I, his ... ? And another word, “dissociate,” for what would later happen. “First love” masking feelings, untranslatable.
So in returning from two months of pent-up fantasies under the accusatory gaze of my mother, I yearned to resume our “studies” and I burst into Gillot’s study with an urgency to tell the truth, my truth, to the one person in the world who would understand and believe me. With that unmentionable incident by the lake last summer and my wish for my mother to drown, for my father and me to escape with the circus, and hoping beyond hope for my dear brother, please God, not to die, I had more than enough stories to fill the fantasy part of our lessons. And enough vivacity to improve on reality for Gillot’s meticulous scholarly translation.
I had begun to feel feverishly desperate in the weeks of our separation. I needed more than his counsel or his spiritual care. I needed his physical presence, that protective warmth of being seen for the first time, for who I was. I was determined to preserve our conversations and never to lose this kinship that I had never before experienced, so I would go to any lengths to confess to Gillot the sins of my fantasies, those black stones weighing down on my “lost soul,” and to pretend a devotion to his religious instruction that I did in fact not have. If only to perpetuate the intoxicating hold of disclosure, this feeling of desire I had for him, I gave myself over freely to my stories, sifting through the embellishments, searching for the one lie that would speak the truth of me to him. That he would believe. That would move him to respond....
MEMORY, what is it? I dreamt of my mother emerging from a flooding of water naked and her body, surrounded by the black snake-like curls I knew so well, was barely pubescent with young buoyant breasts and nipples that looked like sand dollars—she was smiling not shamed at all by her nakedness or struck by my alarm . . . she did not seem to recognize me but lifted both arms and then with aplomb reached with her left hand to deliver into mine her right hand severed from an arm that fell limp at her side like a complacent tired doll. The water around her was a ruby red but no blood drained from her body. And the hand I held in my hand was that of an old woman, with blue veins mapping traces of deep riverbeds. But to which there was no delta. And I stood there, with her detached hand held in mine, and reached for a water lily to wrap the hand in, and pulling it from its root I looked into the heart of the flower to see a face with eyes so like Evgeny but somehow not his at all, how could it be, and I let it go to float away in the pink river ... away from me, from my grasp.... And I felt the full surge of a scream that was inaudible. Though I tried, I could not be heard. And then I awoke, holding nothing but the memory of a dream.
What is dream but a distorted creation? What is memory—but a created distortion? Then if memory is at once remembering and inventing at the same time, what can reality be? An invention?
And why does it frighten me so? . . . I asked Gillot when I returned to him that fall and our “fairy tale hours” became more fraught with emotion, sometimes to the point of precipitating a fainting spell. Far more than missing Gillot, I found that the tension around those secret meetings (a tension that seemed to escalate with each questioning look of my mother, trustful pat from my father and stoic accepting smile of my brother, as I made my exit) began to overtake me. I no longer spun my tales to exert control but my tales began to spin me.
Gillot seemed to soften with each telling of my emotional distress and I interpreted that to mean he had also cared and had missed me. He was no longer the stern patronizing analyst of my foolish stories. Seeing that they terrified me to the point of tears, he took me on his lap, caressed my hair and face, and whispered tenderly, “Girl, you must let it all out. I am here. No one can hurt you.”
Could I have really been so blind, so breathlessly naïve? Was he simply obtuse to what we were doing or mercurial, calculating? I question now what I couldn’t then, no not for a moment.
I tried to reason out the torture of my dream—my childlike mother, the Neva floods of family lore, my brother—no, her brother—swirling down a river of generations of blood in the innocent hold of a water lily and the culprit who was responsible for this family misfortune that spilled into my sleep, where was he? The sly one was nowhere in my night’s creation. He stood somewhere beyond the grasp of sleep.
Could I find him if I was vigilant enough and pieced together the story I remembered of the Neva flood with the details of my dream? What had happened to my mother that day so long ago? And why did she forever fear me, her girl-child? And who in God’s name was the culprit—my grandfather?—or was it perhaps me for imagining these torturous things—for suspecting something I could not see ...
I was dreaming the unspeakable—sexual betrayal, my mother’s, of course, never mine.... No, push it away. And he, well, uncertain now but still so comforting, deliberate in wanting to continue.
Intuiting that this relentless questing for meaning left me sleepless, losing weight and filled with more questions than useful answers, Gillot began to focus our studies on a neutral subject—a space