Jonathan Tel

Freud's Alphabet

Scribner, 2003.

Regent's Park. Early afternoon. A clear sky apart from a handful of clouds shaped like penny loaves. A nanny strolls along the sanded path, wheeling a vast navy-blue perambulator, with its hood up to protect from the elements a tiny, well-swaddled infant. Another nanny follows at a discreet distance. And then another. A fleet of perambulators, sailing off towards the horizon. These are followed by an old man in a Bath chair, being wheeled by a young girl, quite possibly his granddaughter. (An ironic inversion, yes; too pointed to seem altogether natural.)

It is 1939 and Sigmund Freud, a refugee from Nazi-annexed Vienna, is 'contrasting the city he happens to be in with the city which is, for him, the obverse of this one - Paris.' The park 'seems quite perfect; if anything a touch too perfect.' A lawnmower goes past, 'the kind that has no box behind it to catch the leavings - instead the green stuff is forced out, splattering all over the Doktor.'

The Doktor sniffs. The sweet aroma of freshly cut grass. Aha! he is beginning to have an inkling: he is spotting the deliberate mistake. For the grass smells "sweet" and that is it. The subtle, the infinitely complex aroma that this would have elsewhere, that it did have, to his certain knowledge, in Paris, is absent in this city