In Other Words by Su Smith
"I do not know if I am breathing, or how I could be, in this airless world."
Clara Immerwahr (1870 — 1915)
Mrs. Fritz Haber
This is how it feels, now, to be Mrs. Fritz Haber. This is how it tastes. Sharp. Acidic. Like pity, like shame.
It was not always so. Before Mother died and Father moved us to Breslau, there were games: skipping, climbing, catch-me-catch-you. There were stick people, fashioned from dry twigs and grass twine, who became, for a short time, as real to us as the Kowalczyk girls from the village, with their matching dirndls and matching plaits.
There was the way Father lowered his glasses to peer at me intently and would describe the properties of elements and compounds, how their propensities bind together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. Together, we marveled at the magic of possibility, the potential of investigating and directing such fusing and transmutation. And there was my thesis defense, in the University of Breslau’s main hall, to which so many townswomen came to crown me erster weiblicher Doktor. I confess it: I took pride in being the first female doctor among them and felt such joy in knowing that, surely, I would not be the last.
Wooed by Christianity, I acknowledged my sins: pride, greed for money of my own, lust when Fritz pressed against me in the dance hall. The wrath and envy that, it seems, go hand in hand with womanhood. In truth, I wed Fritz to purge myself of those trespasses, to atone for the constant condition of wrongdoing in which I found myself.
And yet it seemed the sinning doubled down. A woman’s place is in the home, but every attempt to conform brought with it extra helpings of envy, more swallowing of wrath that writhed within me like a serpent. I tried to live well. I assisted Fritz in his work, with no recognition. Still, I transgressed. When I grew round with child and birthed Hermann, sloth grasped at me and so did guilt. The child was, perhaps, to be reparation for my ungodliness.
Fritz left us often, for long stretches of time. He took his expanding knowledge and increasing coldness to the other side of the world or merely to taverns close to home but far from domestic responsibility. It became second nature to pretend not to know what he did.
Until the damp, heavy day, nine days since, when his plans came to fruition in Flanders, and I could pretend no longer.
I lay across our bed that day, next to Hermann, and lifted his little, light, innocent hand from my arm, unable to stomach his touch. The unbearable detail in my thoughts was appropriate punishment for intellectual pride, perhaps. Oh, I understood, intimately, this bastardised chemistry.
Diatomic gas, two and a half times denser than air.
Surrounding faces, it would be causing irritation to eyes, coughing and vomiting. In human lungs, the hydrochloric acid formed by reaction with water would be eating at tissue, eroding slowly and unstoppably as those burning bellows made desperate, doomed attempts to breathe, to speak.
Images of countless, nameless men rushed behind my eyes: fathers, brothers — have mercy, sons — bewildered, choking, blood-spluttering, blind. I felt it bodily: Death clutching at each man’s throat, unsighting them, suffocating them. I smelt acrid chlorine in my own windpipe, tasted its metallic tang on a swollen, agonized tongue. Horror, incalculable in scientific terms. Inconceivable in human ones. Anguish unspeakable.
I did not weep, nor sob, nor scream; there was no sound guttural enough to release the terror and hatred that pulsed within me. My very blood seemed a different mixture at that moment, as if some venom had entered alongside its basic elements.
Fritz Haber, my husband. Devil incarnate.
The poison flows through my life stream still. Fritz has returned, gladdened by his work, excited by alchemy, glorifying in the gory purposes to which he applies a chemist’s calculations and dreams. He will leave the day after next for the Eastern Front, taking his barbarous blend to another battlefield to practice further his murderous methodology.
There is no atomic bonding, no engineered compound, no philosophy, no prayer, no kindness, nor any entire life’s work that could atone for the abomination he has unleashed. There is no way to make reparation for the sins I have served. There is, now, only this: Fritz’s military pistol gleaming proud, daring me. The sudden, certain knowledge that its retort must be the roar of anger, pain and abhorrence for which I longed. One final sin to end other sinning.
There is only this in answer, now.
Mae (Mary) Coughlin (1897 — 1986)
Mrs. Al Capone
I was 21 when we married, 28 when my hair turned gray.
I am best left unquestioned about the years in between.
Simone Melchoir (1919 — 1990)
Mrs. Jacques Cousteau
My hands smooth over my hip bones and are surprised at the curves they encounter. I am something new, something fluid, no longer the boyish-figured, angular shape I was only yesterday. The scalloped edge of my bodice juts outwards, unfamiliar, and intriguing. Stepping forwards, I cannot feel the floor, nor see my legs or feet; ocean-colored silk swathes downwards and glides before me as I move, like water pooling.
At the party, light enters sideways and rolls in waves across the surface above. I float through murky depths, glimmering green-gold as I drift in Mother’s wake. I try to blink, and find myself unable to do so, yet my eyes are not dry.
Chords resound heavy through the haze, rippling away over another note which strikes deep and melodic. Voices whistle and click rhythmically, distantly, an alien language on another frequency. I move dreamily through these unusual sounds, first allowing them to wash over me and then willing them to seep into me. I can discern no meaning in them.
Men, sleek and powerful in black and white, circle everywhere, their teeth glistening wetly in the dim. They are too large, and too high; their monochrome sharpness is a fright and I dart, nervous, behind Mother, and hang in her shadows, suspended in uncertainty. I do not know if I am breathing, or how I could be, in this airless world. Girls — young women, of course, like me — appear to have grouped themselves by color: a silver shoal on one flank, a red swarm on the other, a bank of yellow up ahead. Each mass shifts restlessly so that first one member then another takes up position on the outside edge. On all sides, these colored creatures’ eyes flitter, large and aqueous, hither and thither in the gloom. From behind Mother’s draping, fin-like sleeves, my eyes do the same. For we are too bright, too noticeable.
I am gradually scolded, jostled, and maneuvered into open space, where I hang defenseless and wary. My elbows smooth themselves as flat as they will go and my breathing shallows and slows so that I am negligible, almost entirely still. Silent, I wait and watch, while shapes lurk and loop in my side vision.
Simone, says Mother formally, this is Jacques Cousteau.
Older than me, by some margin. Dark hair. As tall as Father, at least. He bows and straightens, regards me seriously. My stomach flutters.
Why, he says, surprised but gentle, you are a mermaid.
Tiny bubbles rise from my stomach to my throat and escape my lips in a silly, coquettish giggle.
Shall we, he says, perhaps dance?
Mother’s head inclines a yes.
His hands, interlaced with mine and encircling my midsection, are definite. Their strength makes me buoyant; I am weightless as we float and spin. Light disperses into fragments and waltzes with us, so that we pass through its flickers and flares. We are light, ourselves. I, a sea-nymph; he, Poseidon.
We whirl slowly into an ante-room and drift to a corner cave where emerald green fronds waft outwards in semi-dark, and moments of fluorescence flit over us. We sink to seats as one. I wait, modestly, for his words.
You find this, he murmurs, as curious as I do. He gestures unspecifically, fingers briefly adrift. His eyes are disconcertingly dark; I had expected, I think, to dive into a boundless sea, looking into them, but see only myself in miniature, swaying in blueish light. I am shimmering, otherworldly, there. I cannot tear my gaze away.
I nod. It is all curious indeed.
This world, he goes on, this earth-dwelling life. It is not, I think, for the likes of us.
Slow and steady, his voice is entrancing, unlike any other, offering questions that are not questions. He is effortlessly solid in this ever-shifting space.
There is more, Simone, he breathes, his hand hovering at my waist. Even without touch, there is a slow surge and swell between us. There is so much more. We are only, he suggests, on the surface, here.
I realize, quite suddenly, why it is that I am not scared; he is not like those circling, black and white, sharp-edged creatures. He is clad in blue, Navy blue, his shoulders tasseled with gold; its flounces rise in the gentlest of billows as he speaks.
He too is ocean-colored, ocean-shaped. We are of the same species, perhaps.
Martha Bernays (1861 — 1951)
Frau Sigmund Freud
Two years engaged, and still mother is painfully difficult about it. Even Minna, ever before a dutiful sister, picks at the idea of our marriage like a scab. Battle lines are being drawn: my family on the one side, my betrothed on the other. I wander a colorless, Hamburg-shaped no man’s land between, impeccably dressed, clean behind the ears, minding my tongue. I am neither unhappy nor impatient, yet not quite at ease.
From the Western Front, the letters come and come and come. Line upon line of scribbled longing, blame, changing tactics. Sigmund, in Paris, misses me desperately, yearns for me inconsolably; is not here. He is concerned about my pale cheeks; prescribes me iron tablets, cocaine, a more nutritious diet. Displaces anger at his lack of progress into anger at the slightest thing anyone might have said or felt about me, about us. Strives to make of them all adversaries, to create some manner of external war. Cannot recognize the conflict in himself. Is not here.
He must learn, struggle, change, crusade; begs that I hold steadfast, remain constant, until he can prove himself worthy and provide for us both.
Waves must break upon the shore. The land must let them gnaw. Neither are at fault for that. Sigmund ebbs and flows, driven and pulled by greater forces than I could possibly imagine, needing something solid against which to beat. He is vicious, passionate, wild; lapping, gentle, subdued. Noisy, silent, unknowably deep, he retracts and comes again.
I hold firm.
We are married, at last. Sigmund’s moustache curves sensuously over his mouth and beard; his cigar juts proudly from his jaw. He is a model Hamburg man. Noble, in profile.
There is a wedding night, as there must be. He pushes into me gradually, apologetically, as if he cares. Then deeply, urgently, insistently, as if he does not. It is painful, and surprising; ultimately, though, not as terrible as I had feared. His translucent outpouring laces over my skin and dries into a salty crust as he lies across me. I am bloody, one of the fallen; he is the victor, and has claimed me. I wait for words, any sign that he is content. Moments, many of them, hang heavy and slide past slowly until at last I understand that he is sleeping.
There will be no need, no time, for love letters, now.
The baby, our sixth, wails and wails. Milk weeps pathetically from the breast she will not take and becomes cold against my hot, stretched skin. Sigmund sits in his chair and considers us as I rock her from one side of the room to the other. His eyes are pebbles. He is thinking, I know, not of the moment of shuddering passion that produced this child, but of the many nights of impotence since. The cigar clamped in his jaw points accusingly. I know this man; the disappointments of those nights are as much a relief to him as to me, but he cannot allow it so. He must dissect and despise himself for it. I lay the baby down and turn from my husband’s gaze to press cool palms against aching nipples.
Sigmund has all he longed for, here in Vienna: a peaceful marriage, a healthy family, a well-ordered home, furnishings, trinkets, a stream of patients, a perfect circle of like-minded acquaintances. Smartness, regularity. Rigour, research, peace in which to write. This dissatisfaction is of his own making. It is with himself, not with us. I must hold firm.
An hour later, the eldest two recount their dreams over dinner. Sigmund carves up and chews upon their words, hungrier for details than vittles. These children, this table, these meals are too real for his taste. He feeds on illusion, fattens himself with fantasy. I grow thinner and am among many not to notice.
I clear the dishes; he takes a walk. When the brood are settled to bed, I brush and lay out his clothes, add toothpaste to his toothbrush. Ready myself for sleep and allow my racing mind, briefly, its say.
She is my sister. My sister. But must I care, if he dips his wick in another’s wax, when I know that the flame inside him burns ever for me? I close my eyes and force behind them the image of his beady-eyed, ugly addendum; I see it standing tall for Minna, thrusting toward her. Can all but smell the cigar he lights afterwards, his jaw sliding as he masticates thoughtlessly. I attempt to feel injury, or spite; feel nothing but a bored kind of sorrow.
I do not speak a word of my own dreamings. Those, he could never hope to analyze.
Sigmund’s cigar, a little sodden at the top, dangles permanently limp now, unlit. It is impossible to remember the desperation of his early passion, to imagine him plunging lustily into me, discharging himself with abandon. But remember and imagine I must, if I am to believe such an existence was ever ours.
Cancer devours his jaw cruelly, unstoppably. His pain is unconscionably real, consciously felt. There is no space for fantasy, now, and I am sorry, so sorry, that he must be destroyed in this unholy fashion, robbed slowly of speech and faith. I gather family, drape blankets over his frail, disappearing shape, hold beakers steady at his whitening mouth and tip them slowly. Drop by drop, I attempt to refill him, until it is clear he can take no more and must be released from this final struggle.
When he is gone, truly gone, I pull a soggy, flaccid cigar from his lip and kiss his brow, dry-eyed.
So many theories and analyses; such relentless battering at the boundaries of knowledge. It has been a lifetime’s work, allowing the waves to crash over me, and I am, I confess, somewhat eroded. But I see it all, now. The utter hopelessness of a man trying to comprehend womanhood, when he cannot see beyond the end of his own nose or other appendage. The pointlessness of a woman attempting to define herself. Fantasy, frustration, desire, pain, memory: bodily or illusory, these are neither male nor female, neither land nor sea. They are only human, and they must be borne. I wish only that Sigmund, dear Sigi, my toughest, truest love, had lived long enough, or battled hard enough, to reach the same conclusion.
Su Smith has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the UK’s Manchester Metropolitan University, earning a distinction. She is currently putting the finishing touches to her debut novel and to an anthology of pieces written in the imagined voices of wives of famous 20th century men, from which this short extract is taken. Su is new to writing, has one prior publication in UK literary magazine Mslexia earlier this year, and does not have an agent or publisher…yet. She lives in a quiet village suburb just outside London, UK. As well as being an avid reader and writer, Su is an animal lover, nature enthusiast and music fan. She is on Instagram/Facebook at @Su_Smith_Author.