After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Page A

bewilders her. I am like a desiccated insect, its color faded. Now it is all mental. Games for a failing man. Loose on the page is a recent photo that has slipped its moorings. I can see exactly how the bottom of my face has sunk and become gaunt, bones jutting out where there used to be plump glossy skin. I sigh.
    â€œI’ve tired you,” she says guiltily, putting her papers together.
    After Hannah shows her out, I start thinking of couples I know where one is old and the other young, like Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren. Power and Beauty living together and I no longer have either. She stayed with him her whole life and was with him when he died. Thinking about death depresses me and I go back to bed and sit there reading a magazine. Articles with pictures are easier for me when I feel this way. I pause at a picture of a beautiful little girl of around five, with cascades of ringlets. The caption is, “Was she killed by her mother?” How could anyone hurt this angelic being? Apparently, the mother’s boyfriend didn’t want her around. He felt she interfered with his plans and wishes. I always used to say that some people oughtn’t to have children.
    It’s a cliché that having children is a blessing. Often when a couple is on the verge of separating, they’ll have one “to bring them close again.” But actually it is a huge strain, like driving an eighteen-wheeler over a bridge that hasn’t been upgraded in years.
    I never felt up to it. Playing with my nephews for a couple of hours was delightful but really all I could manage. I’m not boasting. It makes me sad that I felt so incapable.
    After the war many of my friends went into analysis. It was a fad among intellectuals. Both Gabriella and Lucian were analyzed. They ended up getting married. Gabriella’s shrink pronounced after meeting Lucian that he was the best of her suitors. I fantasized that it could help me find the perfect mate. Instead, my analyst seemed to be reading from a script, speaking with reverence of the Oedipus complex as the key that unlocked every neurosis including the one that stood in the way of my progress.
    It’s not that my relationship with my mother couldn’t bear looking into—I was a manipulative, histrionic child and from early on I could wheedle almost anything out of her. It was the analyst’s attitude that upset me. So knowing, so superior, as though he were a god, not a human being with ordinaryflaws. Belief in Freud was at its peak. And if I ever objected to one of his interpretations, he would insist I was resisting.
    â€œDon’t you see zat?” He spoke Italian with a strong German accent, particularly clear on his consonants. “This it is part of ze transference onto me of feelings that you had towards your vather?”
    I should have left. The truth is I had no transference to my analyst, not even a liking for him. If I’d liked him I might have accepted more of his interpretation. As it was, my image of myself suffered and I came away with a negative view of myself.
    The analyst perceived right away that under my charm and warmth I was a somewhat selfish narcissist. I erase the word
narcissist
and leave the qualified
somewhat selfish-Narcissist
seems too harsh. His judgment of me still hurts. True, I didn’t want a child to take a woman’s attention away from me. But thousands of men probably feel the same way.
    And by the time I found Hannah, wasn’t she herself my mother-child in one? She, too, wanted total possession. She couldn’t share me anymore than I could have shared her. She was damaged more grievously than most, a child who had suffered the unspeakable cruelty of the camps. But that only made it more challenging to save and nurture her. Every time I thought of something new to bring her, I felt as excited as I did when I was shooting a film or writing a poem and something snapped into place. And I loved the image of