A Curable Romantic (34 page)

“ ‘Yes, angel? Counsel me, please!’

“ ‘… I’d run!’ said he.

“In a twinkling, he or she or they or it were gone, and I was left to face the advancing horde alone.”

Ita swallowed and wet her lips. “Oh, what a sight these dark angels were, Yankl! Their noses were so long, they drooped to the middle of their chests. Flames shot out of their nostrils. Their burning cudgels had charred their skins. Their sooty wings beat at their dirty backs. The black leather harness each wore was studded with spikes and gleaming metal bits. Among them were men and women, brothers and sisters it seemed from the similarity of their features, and only because the laws of forbidden intercourse do not apply to angels was I able to get away from them. For just as they’d spotted me, just as the chase was about to begin, each of these dogmen, their uncircumcised members grown as long as curved scimitars at the smell of their frightened prey, grabbed a sister by the hair and threw her to the ground where, growling and biting, they mounted her for their pleasure, three or four brothers to a sister, as the women were in the minority. The other males stopped to watch, laughing their cruel laughter, pulling their brothers off and replacing them when their patience wore thin. Immortal, they seemed to delight in thrashing one another to within an inch of their eternal lives, slitting open one another’s bellies, for example, and yanking out one another’s intestines, bashing one another’s heads in, the recipient of the blows more aroused, it seemed, than his tormentor.

“How much of this horror can I relate to you? Only one more thing: as I stood watching this terrible sight, these dark angels kept their eyes, seven to a skull, fastened upon me, man and woman alike, as if to tell me that it didn’t matter, that they had all the time in the world, that I was going nowhere and could never run far or fast enough to elude them. And yet they were clearly urging me on, if only for the sport of it, I thought. What pleasure would there be in it for them if I submitted? I understood as much and, when they contrived to look away, their attention drawn to the yelping of one of their sisters as she climaxed, flailing beneath the weight of her brothers — two of whom sat with their knees upon her
outstretched arms and two upon her outstretched legs — I fled. I fled, knowing that my capture was inevitable, knowing that if they caught me, they would abuse me horribly, hurling me from one end of the universe to the other, like a ball in a game of toss. My escape was from any reasonable point of view futile. Is there any place where God’s will may be overturned? But the dead are only human, and are therefore subject to self-deception, isn’t that correct, Dr. Freud? And so I ran. Or rather, they let me run. The pleasure for the pursuer is not in the capture, but in the heart-thumping terror of the chase, fear making sweeter the lashings and the beatings. I ran, the horde on my heels, my back lashed by the teeth of their whips, their garlicky breath in my ears, until suddenly in my terror I recalled the words of my guardian — ‘In a stone, in an animal, in another human being’ — and I jumped inside a granite crucifix stationed over a grave. At least here, they were powerless to touch me. Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t bear the idolatrous spirits inhabiting the stone, and I leapt into a rock. Lifetimes later, it seemed, this rock was thrown by a small boy into a stable. My presence there drove the horses mad. One beast, in its fright, beat against the rock with its hooves until I was driven out. The punishing horde was waiting for me still, I knew, but somehow I was able to dive headfirst into the entrails of a cow. I hoped that its slaughter by a kosher butcher would at last atone for my sins and end this long, mad dash, the ultimate point of which I was beginning to forget. The stench of the beast was intolerable, however, and I jumped into a horse, and when I overheard the coachman saying he was traveling to Vienna the next day, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All of a sudden, I remembered the object of my desire.”

“Which was?”

“Why, you, of course, Yankl! You! I was nearer to you than I had ever been.”

I blushed at these words. “
I
was your goal?” I said.

According to Ita, it was not out of spite or rebellion that she’d refused to submit to the Heavenly Tribunal. Neither was she afraid of the punishments waiting for her there. She knew what she had done: she was a suicide, a sinner as black as any, blacker than most, in fact, and although she might believe she was driven to it by other hands, she was realistic
enough to know that, as a defense, this tack would be laughed out of the Heavenly Court by the Heavenly Judges, who, unlike their human counterparts, could not be moved to pity. Submit, she knew, endure the shaming fires of Gehenna, and be cleansed, made new and as white as a freshly laundered shirt. (The more time she spent in the corridor between lives, the clearer her memories of her previous visits became. How clearly she now recalled the steam-cleaning each soul receives at the end of its sentence, the great, steaming machinery through which each is pressed, before being hung to dry, wrinkleless and crisp, and placed into a zygote by the same angelic hands that secrete the scent inside each rose.) It would have been easy to turn herself in, to surrender, if it weren’t for the thinnest hopes she still had of attaining her goal, which was (I blush to transcribe this): me. When at last the coachman arrived in Vienna, she knew her wanderings were nearing their end.

Leaning forward in bed, she exclaimed: “Don’t ask me how I found your Fräulein Eckstein, Yankl. Accept that the Hand of God aids saints and sinners alike. What in a novel might be called coincidence is merely the invisible machinery of Heaven awkwardly revealing itself, and there I was. How glorious is our Lord, Yankl; though I spit in His face, He opens His hand to satisfy the desire of every living thing. Fräulein Eckstein’s hand opened to her desire as well, as I explained earlier, indeed as I demonstrated, and I slipped in thereby, lodging between the blooming rose of her old maidenhood and the storehouse of mulch and dreck. In life, I’d learned to expect little, and so I was happy there, until one evening — oh, one glorious evening! — she accompanied her mother to the Carl. And that’s where I saw you. Yes, my love! Way, way, way up in the fourth or fifth gallery. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I would draw you to me, using Fräulein Eckstein as an old paillard might a young boy to sexually ensnare the child’s mother.”

Ita looked out brazenly from inside Fräulein Eckstein’s face. “And the rest you more or less know,” she said with a little shrug.

I looked at Dr. Freud, seated behind the head of her bed. He wore his Tarock face, letting nothing show. How absurd we seemed, he and I, how ill prepared for such a cosmic turn of events, with our late-empire beards, and comical pince-nez and other turn-of-the-century sartorial
fripperies. Ita, on the other hand, seemed as happy as a hypochondriac to have two such attentive suitors at her bedside.

“And so there we are,” she said, leaning back comfortably into her pillows.

THERE WE WERE
indeed.

“Do you mind if … if I take a sip of your water?” I said to Fräulein Eckstein, or to Ita, or to whomever. What did it matter? I’d asked only out of politeness, and neither of them responded. My hands trembled as I poured a glass from their bedside pitcher. (Yes,
their.
It was impossible for me to think of them now as other than two souls residing in a single body. They were like flatmates who’d outgrown the small apartment they nevertheless continued to share.) “Sorry,” I said, bending down with one of Dr. Freud’s massage towels to mop up the water I’d spilled.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, why don’t you sit down!” Dr. Freud said sharply. “Either the water will dry of itself or we’ll send for a nurse to sop it up.”

“Yes … thank you,” I said. “I think I will.” I sat and brought the glass to my mouth, sipping inexpertly and choking as a result.

My life felt like an ill-fitting suit someone else had picked out for me; I barely recognized myself in it: Was I truly the sort of man who could drive his wife to murder herself?

“Stop luxuriating in your guilt,” Dr. Freud said to me.

I raised my eyes to find him and Ita (or was it Fräulein Eckstein?) staring at me, Dr. Freud with his invasive gaze: the seer, the knower of open secrets, the diviner of poorly hidden things. It was alarming to find myself the object of their attentions. Of all the characters in this strange drama, I imagined myself far from being its protagonist. Wasn’t I the most minor of players here: an insignificant consultant called in by the great doctor; a forgettable suitor to the mysterious patient; a husband for no more than a few hours to the avenging Fury; the wayward, problematical son to the extraordinarily successful businessman and scholar? Who was I to find myself the author of everyone’s sorrows? The answer resounded simply and clearly: You are Ya’akov Yosef Sammelsohn, murderer of your wife.

“May I see you in the passageway outside?” Dr. Freud said, gesturing with his head. I rose from my chair, knocking into the table as I did and tipping over the glass I’d left there. The rest of the water ran off the table onto the chair and dribbled onto the floor. Torn between honoring Dr. Freud’s wishes and mopping up the spill, I hesitated so that Dr. Freud had no choice but to bark: “Leave it, Dr. Sammelsohn, leave it! I need to speak with you this instant!”

In the passageway, he lit a cigar.

“Ah,” he sighed extravagantly. “Nicotine is a slow poison, and yet, in moments of extreme agitation, a poison can also be a balm. Would you care for one?”

“No, thank you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine anything less agreeable.

Dr. Freud blew a poisoned fume into my face. “Well, I’m done with them now, you know” — he patted his breast pocket — “and carry them only for emergencies.”

I didn’t know what to say. Was he deluded? joking? mad? The man smoked incessantly! He smoked like a badly ventilated stove! His clothes reeked of tobacco and sulfur, his teeth were a sooty grey, the pores of his face were coated with a translucent lather of nicotine. Identical to the writer’s callus on the middle finger of his right hand was a smoker’s callus on the middle finger of the left. A close inspection of his coattails and his pant legs revealed a thousand tiny burns. I’d never in the course of our acquaintance seen him without a cigar, and yet he held rigidly to the fiction of his abstinence, and until that very moment — I was shocked to realize — I’d never thought to question this fiction myself. Why, if you had asked me, I would have told you that, yes, except on the rare festive occasion or under duress to calm his jangled nerves, Dr. Freud is no longer a smoker. And so, when he told me, “Dr. Sammelsohn, there
is
no Ita. The woman you imagine in your fervid guilt-filled fantasies having killed is naught but a complex symptom of hysteria,” I was, for the first time in our association, inclined to disbelieve him.

“You can’t tell me I wasn’t speaking to my wife.”

“To your former wife, if indeed she is dead, and dead by her own hand, which I very much doubt.”

“But you heard her yourself!”

He clicked his tongue with a condescending clack. “You have no idea how real these delusions may seem. The appearance of a second personality is often, if not always, presented in a deceptive manner, its pathogenic material belonging to an intelligence not inferior to the patient’s normal ego, but I assure you, Dr. Sammelsohn, even were I inclined to accept as real the possibility of a dybbuk possession, I’m experienced enough in these matters to distinguish between an actual person, be she alive or dead, and an hysterically induced condition seconde. When I say that the pathogenic material behaves like a foreign body, and that its treatment proceeds, too, like the removal of a foreign body from living tissue, I assure you, Herr Doktor, the foreign body I have in mind is a tumor, and not a dybbuk!”

“But — ”

“No, no, you see, you must learn to listen to the discourse
within
the discourse. When Fräulein Eckstein, speaking in the voice of Ita, confesses that she conspired in her own humiliations, she has told us everything.”

“How so?”

“Well, what was Ita after?”

“Love,” I said.

“And whom does Fräulein Eckstein love?”

“Why, you, of course.”

“And what could be more humiliating than these hysterical antics she’s putting herself through. You see? Only ask yourself: can you imagine a more efficient means for keeping me at her bedside?”

“But — but — but,” I stammered, gesturing towards the wall behind which Fräulein Eckstein lay, “the things she knew … Fräulein Eckstein couldn’t have known them!”

“Oh, well, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, et cetera, et cetera, and the geographies of the mind, believe me, Dr. Sammelsohn, are stranger than any Baedeker might reveal.”

“So I didn’t kill her?” I asked meekly.

“Send a telegram home to your sisters, if you doubt me, inquiring after the health of your wife, Ita.”

“I’ve resolved to do as much already.”

“Although, I assure you, there’s no need.”

“Still.”

“And if you’re intent on this foolish gesture, may I dare to counsel you, as an older friend?”

“Yes. Please. Certainly.”

“Along with the telegram, send a get.” Here, Dr. Freud meant a rabbinic decree of divorce. “Divorce yourself from this poor girl. Remove the twin albatrosses of responsibility and guilt that hang around your neck. Stop paying interest on your father’s debt. He’s the moral bankrupt, not you. Do yourself, as well as the girl, this service, and I promise you, you shan’t regret it.”

“But of course you’re right.”

“What stuff and nonsense they’ve filled your head with.” He touched my hair affectionately. “Mine, too, of course. Oh, yes, I had a religious upbringing — strict, too — a Hebrew teacher, Hammerschlag by name, the whole bolt of cloth. But with the tools of scientific objectivity, you understand, I’ve been able to put it all behind me. And when you witness my curing of Fräulein Eckstein with the young science of psychoanalysis, you, too, will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that dybbuks, demons, ibburs, and such like, are nothing more than the fairy tales we use to enslave ourselves to our own fears. Why, religion is nothing but a prison house constructed by the inmates themselves; the clerics, the guards we appoint above ourselves. Man will do anything not to confront the empty, howling wilderness that is the universe God abandoned long ago, this terrifying no-man’s land filled with chaos and desolation.”