He provided her with a new name (the M stands for Miracle) and sculpted/bullied the child prodigy into an adult star. At the age of six, she was adopted by an exacting teacher, the diminutive genius Arthur Goldstein, who took her, fairytale fashion, from foster parents in Suffolk when her talent became unmistakable. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and powerĮlsa’s origins are uncertain and somehow in 34 years it has never occurred to her to probe them more deeply.

Now she is drifting around Europe, teaching the children of people wealthy enough to afford her services and trying to grapple with the mystery of who she really is. Three weeks earlier, she performed Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in the Golden Hall in Vienna, lost her place in the music and walked off stage mid-performance, an unforgivable act. Elsa is a famous concert pianist who has come to Athens in the wake of a catastrophe. In the case of Elsa M Anderson, the watching woman in the Athens flea market, the encounter with the doppelganger is the second staging post in a deeply Freudian fable of lost memory and severed selves. It can represent evil impulses or unwanted memories, long buried and rapping for attention.

Long before Freud began talking about repressed memories and unacknowledged impulses, the doppelganger was a way of understanding a divided self, in which certain vital parts have been disallowed or smothered at birth. In The Jolly Corner by Henry James, a man nightly stalks an empty house, certain it is inhabited by a ghastly version of himself, the person he would have become if he hadn’t escaped New York.

She was me and I was her.”įrom Dostoevsky to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the doppelganger is among the delights of literature and film alike. As she greedily observes the transaction, she is compelled by the sense that she is looking at herself, “that she and I were the same person. Both women are wearing the same coat, a green trench, tightly belted. A young woman in an Athens flea market sees a stranger buy two mechanical horses, which dance when their tails are pulled up.

The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson