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But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long (Irvin D. Yalom) | Part A’

But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long (Irvin D. Yalom) | Part A’

I was perplexed. After fifty years in practice I thought I had seen everything, but I had never before had a new patient enter my office offering me a photograph of herself in the bloom of youth. And I was even more unnerved when this patient, Natasha, a portly Russian woman of seventy or so, stared as intently at me as I stared at the photograph of a beautiful ballerina in arabesque pose, balanced majestically on one toe and stretching both arms gracefully upward. I turned my glance back to Natasha, who, though no longer slender, had coasted to her seat with a dancer’s grace. She must have sensed I was trying to locate the young dancer in her, for she raised her chin and turned her head just a bit to offer me a clear profile. Natasha’s facial features had been coarsened, perhaps by too many Russian winters and too much alcohol. Still, she was an attractive woman, though not as beautiful as before, I thought, as I glanced once again at the photograph of the young Natasha, a marvel of elegance.

“Was I not lovely?” she coyly asked. When I nodded, she continued. “I was a prima ballerina at La Scala.”

“Do you always think of yourself in the past tense?”

She drew herself back. “What a rude question, Dr. Yalom. Obviously you’ve taken the bad manners course that is required for all therapists. But,” she paused to consider the matter, “perhaps it is so. Perhaps you are right. But what is strange in the case of Natalya the ballerina is that I was finished as a dancer before I was thirty—forty years ago—and I’ve been happier, ever so much happier, since I stopped dancing.”

“You stopped dancing forty years ago and yet here, today, you enter my office offering me this picture of you as a young dancer. Surely you must feel that I would be uninterested in the Natasha of today?” She blinked two or three times and then looked about for a minute, inspecting the décor of my office.

“I had a dream about you last night,” she said. “If I close my eyes, I can still see it. I was coming to see you and entered a room. It wasn’t like this office. Perhaps it was your home, and there were a lot of people there, perhaps your wife and family, and I was carrying a big canvas bag full of rifles and cleaning equipment for them. I could see you surrounded by people in one corner, and I knew it was you from the picture on the cover of your Schopenhauer novel. I couldn’t make my way to you or even catch your eye. There was more, but that’s all I recall.”

“Ah, and do you see any link between your dream and your offering me this photograph?”

“Rifles mean penises. I know that from a long psychoanalysis. My analyst told me I used the penis as a weapon. When I had an argument with my boyfriend, Sergei, the lead dancer in the company and, later, my husband, I would go out, get drunk, find a penis, any penis—the particular owner was incidental—and have sex in order to wound Sergei and make me feel better. It always worked. But briefly. Very briefly.”

“And the link between the dream and the photograph?”

“The same question? You persist? Perhaps you’re insinuating that I am using this picture of my young self to interest you in me sexually? Not only is this insulting, but it makes no sense whatsoever.”

Her grand entrance holding the photograph was loaded with meaning. Of that I had no doubt, but I let it go for the moment and got down to business in a more direct fashion. “Please, let’s now consider your reasons for contacting me. From your email I know you will be in San Francisco for only a short time and that it was extraordinarily urgent I meet with you today and tomorrow because you felt you were ‘lost outside of your life and couldn’t find your way back.’ Please tell me about that. You wrote that it was a matter of life and death.”

“Yes, that’s what it feels like. It’s very hard to describe, but something serious is happening to me. I’ve come to visit California with my husband, Pavel, and we’ve done what we’ve always done on such visits. He met with some important clients; we’ve seen our Russian friends, driven to Napa Valley, gone to the San Francisco opera, and dined at fine restaurants. But somehow this time it’s not the same. How to put it? The Russian word is ostrannaya. I’m not truly here. Nothing that happens sinks in. I have insulation around me; I feel it is not mehere, not me experiencing these things. I’m anxious, very distracted. And not sleeping well. I wish my English was better to describe things. Once I lived in the US for four years and took many lessons, but my English still feels clumsy.”

“Your English so far is excellent, and you’re doing a good job describing how you feel. Tell me, how do you explain it? What do you think is happening to you?”

“I’m bewildered. I mentioned I needed a four-year psychoanalysis long ago, when I was in terrible crisis. But even then I did not have this feeling. And since then life has been good. Until now I’ve been completely well for many years.”

“This state of not being in your life. Let’s try to trace it back. When do you think this feeling began? How long ago?”

“I can’t say. It’s such an odd feeling and a vague feeling that it’s hard to pinpoint it. I know we’ve been in California for about three days.”

“Your email to me was written a week ago; that was before you came to California. Where were you at that time?”

“We spent a week in New York, then a few days in Washington, and then flew here.”

“Anything unsettling happen in New York or Washington?”

“Nothing. Just the usual jet lag. Pavel had several business meetings, and I was alone to explore. Usually I love exploring cities.”

“And this time? Tell me exactly what you did while he was working.”

“In New York, I walked. I . . . how do you say it in English? . . . looked at people? People watched?”

“Yes, people watched.”

“So I people watched, and I shopped and spent days visiting the Met museum. Oh yes, I am certain I felt good in New York because I remember that, on one beautiful sunny day, Pavel and I took a boat trip excursion around Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and I remember we both felt so wonderful. So it was after New York that I started going downhill.”

“Try to recall the trip to Washington. What did you do?”

“I did what I always do. I followed my usual pattern. I visited Smithsonian museums every day: the Air and Space, Natural History, American History, and, oh yes, yes! There was one strong event when I visited the National Gallery.”

“What happened? Try to describe it.”

“I was so excited when I saw a huge outside banner announcing an exhibition on the history of ballet.”

“Yes, and what happened?”

“As soon as I saw that banner, I rushed inside the gallery, so excited that I pushed and forced my way to the front of the line. I was looking for something. I believe I was looking for Sergei.”

“Sergei? You mean your first husband?”

“Yes, my first husband. This won’t really make sense to you unless I tell you some things about my life. May I present some of my highlights? I’ve been rehearsing a speech for days.”

Concerned that she was about to go on stage and that her presentation might use up all our time, I responded, “Yes, a brief summary would be helpful.”

“To start, you must know I absolutely lacked mothering and my lifelong feeling of lack of mothering was the central focus of my analysis. I was born in Odessa, and my parents separated before I was born. I never knew my father, and my mother never spoke of him. My mother hardly spoke of anything. Poor woman, she was always ill and died from cancer just before I was ten. I remember at my tenth birthday party . . . ”

After my mother died, her twin sister, Aunt Olga, took me to St. Petersburg and raised me. Now Aunt Olga was a kind person, and she was always good to me, but she had to support herself—she was unmarried—and she worked hard and had little time for me. She was a very good violinist and traveled with the symphony orchestra much of the year. She knew I was a good dancer, and about a year after I arrived, she arranged for auditions, where I performed well enough for her to deposit me in the Vaganova Ballet Academy, where I spent the next eight years. I became such a good dancer that, at the age of eighteen, I received an offer from the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater, where I danced for a few years. That was where I met Sergei, one of the great dancers and egotists and philanderers of our time and who is also the great love of my life.”

“You use the present tense? Still the great love of your life?”

Bristling a bit at my interruption, she said, sharply, “Please let me continue. You asked me to rush, and I’m hurrying, and I want to relate this in my own way. Sergei and I married, and, almost miraculously, he and I managed to defect when he accepted an offer with La Scala in Italy. After all, tell me, who could live in Russia in those years? Now I must discuss Sergei—he had a leading role in my life. Less than a year after we married, I was crippled with pain, and the doctor told me I had gout. Tell me, can you imagine a more catastrophic illness for a ballerina? No, there is none! Gout ended my career before I was thirty. And, then, what did Sergei, the love of my life, do? He immediately left me for another dancer. And what did I do? I went quite crazy and almost killed myself with alcohol and almost killed him with a broken bottle and I slashed scars on his face to remember me by. My aunt Olga had to come to take me from the Milan psychiatric hospital and bring me back to Russia, and that’s when I started the psychoanalysis that saved my life. My aunt found one of the only psychoanalysts in all of Russia, and even he was practicing underground. Much of my analysis was about Sergei, about getting over the pain he gave me, about quitting alcohol forever, about ending my parade of shallow affairs. And maybe about learning how to love—love myself and love others.

“When I improved, I attended the university, and in music studies I soon found out, to my surprise, that I had talent for the cello, not enough to perform but enough to teach, and I have been a cello teacher ever since. Pavel, my husband, was one of my first students. The worst cellist I ever saw, but a wonderful man and, as it turned out later, a very smart and successful businessman. We fell in love, he divorced his wife for me, and we married and have had a long, marvelous life together.”

“Very succinct and wonderfully clear, Natasha. Thank you.”

“As I say, I’ve been rehearsing it in my mind many times. You see why I didn’t want any interruptions?”

“Yes, I understand. So now let’s return to the museum in Washington.”

“Yes, I’m quite sure now that Sergei was my agenda, my secret agenda when I entered the exhibition. And I mean secret even from myself. The love of my life doesn’t necessarily mean my conscious life. You, a famous psychiatrist, should appreciate that.”

“Mea culpa.” I found her soft jabs rather charming and enlivening.

“I forgive you—just this once. Now to my visit to the exhibit. They showed a lot of early Russian posters from the Bolshoi and the Kirov, and one of them, hanging near the entrance, was a stunning picture of Sergei flying like an angel through the air in Swan Lake. It was somewhat blurred, but I’m sure it was Sergei, even though his name was not given. I searched for hours through the entire exhibition, but there was no mention of his name, not one single time. Can you believe it? Sergei was like a god, and yet his name no longer exists. Now I remember . . . ”

“What? What do you remember?”

“You asked when I first began to lose myself. It happened then. I remember walking out of that exhibit as though I were in a trance, and I’ve not felt like myself since.”

“Do you recall searching also for yourself in the museum? For pictures or mentions of your name?”

“I don’t remember that day very well. So I have to rebuild it. Is that the right word?”

“I understand. You have to reconstruct it.”

“Yes, I must reconstruct the visit. I think that I was so shocked by Sergei not being included that I said to myself, ‘If he was not there, how could I possibly be included?’ But perhaps in a timid way I did look for myself. There were some undated photos of La Scala’s Giselle—for two seasons I played Myrtha—and I do remember peering so closely at one photo that my nose touched the photograph and the guard ran over, glowered at me, and pointed to an imaginary line on the floor and told me not to cross it.”

“It seems such a human thing to do, to look for yourself in those historical photos.”

“But what right did I have to look for myself? I repeat—I still don’t think you’ve registered it. You’re not listening. You’ve not grasped that Sergei was a god, that he soared above us in the clouds, and all of us, all the other dancers, gazed upon him as children upon a majestic airship.”

“I’m puzzled. Let me summarize what I know so far about Sergei. He was a great dancer, and the two of you performed together in Russia, and then, when he defected to dance in Italy, you chose to go with him and then married him. And then when you got gout, he promptly abandoned you and took up with another woman, at which point you became extremely disturbed and slashed him with a broken bottle. Right so far?”

Natasha nodded, “Right.”

“After you left Italy with your aunt, what further contact did you have with Sergei?”

“None. Nothing. I never saw him again. Never heard from him again. Not one word.”

“But you kept thinking about him?”

“Yes, at first when I heard his name mentioned, I’d obsess about him and had to bang my head to knock him out of my brain. But, eventually, I blotted him from my memory. I cut him out.”

“He did you great harm, and you cut him out of your memory, but last week you went into that National Gallery exhibit thinking of him as ‘the love of your life,’ searching for him, and then grew outraged that he had been overlooked and forgotten. You can see my confusion.”

“Yes, yes, I understand you. A big contradiction, I agree. Going to that museum show was like performing an excavation in my mind. It’s like I blindly struck a massive vein of energy that has now come spewing out. I speak in a clumsy way. Do you understand?”

When I nodded, Natasha continued, “Sergei was four years older than me, so he is now about seventy-three. That is, if he is alive. And yet I cannot imagine a seventy-three-year-old Sergei. It’s impossible. Believe me, if you knew him, you’d understand. In my mind I see only that young beautiful dancer in the poster sailing forever through the air. Have I heard from him? No, not one word from him since I slashed his face so long ago! I could find out. I could probably find him on the Internet, perhaps Facebook, but I’m afraid to search.”

“Afraid of?”

“Almost everything. That he’s dead. Or that he is still beautiful and wants me. That we’ll email and that the pain in my breast will be unbearable and that I’ll fall in love again. That I’ll leave Pavel and go to Sergei wherever he is.”

“You speak as though your life with Sergei is simply frozen in time and exists somewhere and that, if you revisit it, everything—the mutual love, the soaring passions, even the youthful beauty—will be exactly the same.”

“So true.”

“Whereas the truth, the real-life scenario, is that Sergei will either be dead or look like a seventy-three-year-old wrinkled man, most likely grey- or white-haired or bald, possibly a bit stooped, possibly feeling entirely differently from you about your time together, perhaps not thinking very kindly of you every time he looks at his scarred face in the mirror.”

“Talk that talk all you want, but at this very moment I’m not listening to what you are saying. Not one word.”

Time was up, and as she stepped toward the door, she noted her photograph on the table and started back for it. I picked it up and handed it to her. Putting it back into her purse, she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, but no more words about this picture. Basta!”

 

 

Creatures of a Day

Irvin D. Yalom



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