abandonment, inducing yet more harm. So I must make conscious my own internal crosscurrents, all that churned inside me as I read the letters from München, and when they came no more, and when the war was over and everyone knew what I had known.
The doctor switched off the machine; stood; walked about the office. Then came the sounds of paper crackling, plastic bags rattling. She must be leaving, I thought, gathering her purchases, her Christmas presents, going home to Helmut or Harold or whatever his name was now, returning to her life—absolved! cleansed!—forgiven by recounting her sins to this Gurevitch, this therapist-confessor. I would follow the doctor, I thought, accost her in some way—but how? And what good would it do? If I did … the therapist would know of my existence, my precious existence as the watcher over the patient … my dear patient …
The crackling stopped. Then there was only the sound of the wind, the scrape of a match. Smoke slid under the door, the snake of smoke. The doctor went to her chair, sat down, turned on the recorder.
Dr. Gurevitch, she said in a hoarse voice, you asked if I could recall a distinct moment, or a series of moments, when I believe the deviation toward extreme countertransference began. I am embarrassed to say that I knew the answer immediately, even before you had completed your question. No, I should not say “embarrassed.” Of course not. The moment, as it had unfolded in time, had been just one of many vivid instances that occur during the course of a patient’s therapy. It was your question that brought its significance into relief.
It took place but a few months ago—how can that be? But yes, it was only last September. We had returned from the summer hiatus, and I had led the trail of talk back to the central unexamined trope of the patient’s life: I was urging her, once again, to explore the emotional effects of her adopted status. She resisted, as usual, and I pressed on. I thought I was in control of the session. I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.
It was a bright day. The sun pierced the blinds, painting lines across the floor and walls. I remember this because of the way the light struck her, as you will see, because it is the light that brings the moment back to me with such clarity.
I said to the patient, Do you see? Do you see how your relationship with your girlfriend Charlotte mirrors your relationship with your mother?
She squirmed and resisted, and finally replied: Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake.
At that moment she leaned forward into the light. She had been in shadow, only her body—did I mention, Dr. Gurevitch, what a very thin body she has, all sinew, so that one instinctively worries if she is well?—only her body had been illuminated, slashed by the beams through the venetian blinds. Now she leaned forward so that her eyes, too, entered the light, while the rest of her small, triangular face narrowed down into the shadows. In that moment, her eyes were nearly the hazel color she and her family persist in believing them to be. For they are actually brown, medium brown, with flecks of yellow, the flecks now catching the light so that her eyes blazed at me from the darkness. And her hair—also brown, not the fictional “dirty blond”—her hair suddenly haloed, a nimbus of frizzy light around her blazing eyes.
Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, she said to me so fiercely from the shadows. Every child thinks these cannot possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake, I do not belong to them. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really are not my parents.
What envy coursed through me! Yes, Dr. Gurevitch, I see now it was envy. She was right: She could shed her family and I could not. Her attachment to them was not “real,” they were not blut, she had inherited nothing from them but experience, which can be discussed, analyzed, understood, changed. But I carried in me—what? What have I inherited from the