ANNA WAS FREQUENTLY SADDENED by flux. How autumn’s spinning leaves ripened first to red then dried to a crackling brown. How spring flowers hidden all winter would bust through the ground unannounced. Bruno told her she was insane. Everyone loves spring, Anna. Stop being foolish. But it wasn’t spring (or fall or winter) that perturbed her. It was their mutability. How one became the next, became the next, the next. It was a shifty enterprise; she didn’t trust it. And change is always an occasion for panic, she tried to explain. Even the changes that one should surely be accustomed to, like the daily rising and setting of the sun. Especially the setting. Tell me, Bruno, in what culture isn’t the sunset a harbinger of doom? Bruno would roll his eyes and drop the argument. So even as October so easily began, the shortening of days steadily jostled the cogs of an apprehension in Anna that couldn’t be denied.
Anna didn’t get home from Kloten until after four thirty. She’d stayed to take a shower. Ursula was irritated. “I wish you’d be more considerate. Stop dawdling in the city. I’m not their mother, you know.” Ursula left so quickly she forgot her jacket. The boys were in the yard and Polly Jean in the den inside her playpen content and chewing on the foot of a stuffed tiger. The house was so quiet that Anna could hear the clocks tick.
That morning’s German lesson left Anna pensive. The German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive. Hypothetical, demanding, factual, wishful. Wistful, bossy, of blunted affect, solicitous. Longing, officious, anhedonic, pleading. Anna tried to make a list of every mood she’d ever been in but ran out of words before even half of her feelings were named.
Anna made a mental note to return home directly after class the next few days as she reached into the playpen and lifted her daughter out. Polly Jean began to cry. “Hush,” Anna said. “I need someone to hold.” She sat in a rocking chair, pinned Polly to her chest with a small blanket, and out of exhaustion, compassion, and perhaps even boredom, all three, cried too.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK you will find at the center of the labyrinth, Anna?”
Catastrophe pushed her down the wending path. She knew that whatever she found, it wouldn’t be pleasant. Anna said as much.
“Psychoanalysis isn’t therapy,” Doktor Messerli replied. “The intent of most therapy is to make you feel better. Psychoanalysis intends to make you into a better person. It’s not the same thing. Analysis rarely feels good. Consider a broken bone improperly healed. You must break the bone again and set it correctly. The second pain is usually greater than the initial trauma. It’s true the journey isn’t pleasant. Anna: it is not meant to be.”
USING CONVOLUTED LOGIC, ANNA could justify a single affair: It feels good in the moment. It distracts me from the things that weigh me down. Bruno has ignored me for years. Can I not have something that belongs entirely to me? It doesn’t count if Bruno doesn’t know. It won’t go on forever, just a while. A while. Just a little while. Anna was clever and could dance around a dozen arguments.
But even clever Anna knew there wasn’t any way to justify two affairs at once. Allow them? Succumb to them? Capitulate? Concede? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But she couldn’t absolve or exonerate herself. So she didn’t. Instead, she pushed every scruple aside and did her best not to worry about it. A task made easier somehow by the affair itself.
When Anna surrendered in the Mumpf woods, a strange, implausible mercy grabbed her by the throat. How futile to flee from my impulses. The epiphany was sharp. A knife. It cut through the ropes at her wrists. My guilts are undeniable. They are unassuageable. They are mine to feel. Mine to own. And that’s what she decided to do. Possess them. Experience them. The sex begat the clarity. I may not be as passive as I think I am. The bus is mine. Goddammit, I’ll drive it. And so the worse she became, the better she became. She was still sad. She was still skittish. She was still herself, and in full danger of being trapped beneath the rubble of her poor choices when her makeshift shelter caved in. But from this terrible awareness Anna drew strength. It was this that set October’s mood. This that jury-rigged her machine. And for as long as it worked—perilous as it was—she’d employ it.