The woman across from her was crying in the careful, contained way of someone who had practiced not crying for most of her life and had only recently given herself permission to stop.
Frau Meier, forty-one, married nineteen years, came to her three months prior with a list of symptoms her previous physician had folded neatly into the word nerves and sent her home with laudanum for it.
Kakania had spent those three months slowly taking the list apart and finding, underneath it, a woman who had simply never once been asked what she wanted and had stopped, somewhere along the way, remembering that she was allowed to want anything at all.
“He says I’m difficult”
Frau Meier said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief that had clearly been pressed for the occasion.
“That I’ve become difficult.
As though I woke up one morning and decided it.”
“And what do you think?”
Kakania asked, the question she should ask more than any other, because it was the one question that nobody else in these women’s lives ever thought to.
Frau Meier didn’t answer right away, and Kakania let the silence hold, the way she always did, watching the other woman’s hands rather than her face, the way they twisted the handkerchief and then deliberately, visibly, made themselves stop.
It was in that pause, the small ordinary pause of an ordinary Tuesday session in an ordinary room with the afternoon light coming through her office window at the angle it always came through at this hour, that her mind went, as it still did without warning, back to that place.
She could not have said what triggered it.
There was no single thread connecting Frau Meier’s careful grief to the asphodels, to the orange twilight, to the pressure of being watched by something her eyes refused to find.
And yet the going back happened anyway, the way an old injury sometimes announces itself on a cold day for no reason the sufferer can name, and she sat with it the same way she sat with everything, still, composed, giving nothing of it to the room.
She remembered the mirror igniting.
She remembered the sound of him saying a fragment of a word that wasn’t finished, and she remembered, or believed she remembered, screaming a name too large to have come from her own mouth into a place too large to have a mouth to receive it.
She remembered the flowers, waking among them, the boat striking a shore that wasn’t there, turning and finding nothing and turning back and finding the wolf, the masked man, and the small dozing serpent, none of them looking at her.
And there the memory simply stopped.
Not faded, not blurred at the edges the way an ordinary memory blurs with time.
Stopped, cleanly, the way a page is cut rather than torn, so that she could stand at the very last thing she remembered and reach for what came after it and find only the sensation of reaching, her hand closing around nothing at all.
The next thing she knew with any certainty was the walk back through the forest, alone, her clothes unchanged, no wound on her, no mark to explain where she had been, only the specific bone deep exhaustion of someone who has been awake far longer than a single day accounts for.
She had gone back to the house just the day after, Monday 3PM as stated in the contract she still had, expecting the servants, the tidy study, Crepus behind his tidy desk asking whether everything was to her satisfaction.
She had found a ruin.
Not a house recently emptied.
A house that had clearly stood empty for years, the kind of empty that has its own particular signature, ivy grown thick and confident across walls that should have been swept clean weekly, windows broken not by any single violent act but by the slow patient work of time finding its way in over seasons, the fountains she remembered standing dry now cracked and choked with weeds that had taken root in their basins as though they had never once held water in living memory.
The gardens she remembered too perfectly trimmed had gone wild in a way that argued for at least a decade of neglect, hedges grown shapeless, the gravel path she’d walked in on now buried under a season’s worth of fallen leaves that had clearly not been the first season to fall there unswept.
She had gone into Vienna afterward and asked, carefully, but found nothing to hold onto.
No one in the city’s medical circles remembered a Herr Crepus Mori, or an offer of an estate physician, or an arrangement of any kind involving a wealthy newcomer trying to buy his way into nobility.
She had gone looking for the names on her own list, the doctors, the disciplinary murmurs, the asylum admissions, and found the list itself intact in her handwriting but the underlying facts gone strange around the edges, dates that didn’t quite reconcile, colleagues who looked at her blankly when she mentioned Doktor Rung by name and then, worse, colleagues who remembered Doktor Rung perfectly well, remembered his retirement, his quiet ordinary decline into old age and death some years back, with no memory at all of a curtained room or a single murmured word repeated for months.
Elisabeth Hartl no longer recalled the physician she’d once fled from.
She recalled, when Kakania asked, only a vague unhappiness from some years ago that she’d since resolved on her own, and thanked Kakania warmly for her help without being able to say, when pressed gently, what exactly she’d needed help with in the first place.
It was not that people had forgotten, the way people ordinarily forget.
It was that there was, quite simply, nothing left in the shape of what she was asking about for them to remember.
The consequences remained, scattered and visible if you knew to look for them, an estate gone to ruin a decade before its time, a woman’s unresolved grief with its cause quietly excised, a doctor’s death from natural causes that had once, she was nearly certain, been something else entirely.
But the center of it, the offer, the man, the name Mori, the honorific she had read from a paper too old for its era, all of it had been taken out of the world as cleanly as a stone lifted from a pond, the ripples left to spread outward with no one left able to say what had caused them.
She had understood, eventually, that this was not an oversight.
Something had gone to the trouble of removing itself from memory the way it had nearly removed her from existence entirely, thoroughly, deliberately, without malice, the same absence of malice she remembered from the river itself.
It had not needed to silence her.
It had simply arranged the world so that there was nothing left for her silence to protect.
She had no choice, after that, but to go on.
There was no one to report it to who would understand the report, no colleague who would believe a story with no corroborating fact left standing anywhere in it, and so she had folded the entire experience the way she suspected the world itself had folded it, not forgotten, never that, she remembered every piece of it that had been left to her with perfect and unwelcome clarity, but set aside, carried privately, worn under the same composed stillness she wore into every session with every patient who needed her to be steady.
“I don’t know what I think,”
Frau Meier said finally, into the quiet Kakania had let stretch long enough to become its own kind of answer.
“I only know I’m tired of being told what I ought to.”
“Then we’ll start there,”
Kakania said, and meant it, and set the field and the river and the name she could no longer fully recall back down into the place she kept them, gently, the way one sets down something too fragile to hold and think about anything else at the same time.