A Curable Romantic (85 page)

(Although the Germans had nullified my passport, I wasn’t exactly a man without a country. I
had
a country. It merely happened to be an imaginary one. For two thousand years, my people had lived in the Land of Zion as though it were real; and although this is perhaps not the place to say it, now that it’s real, I regret that we too often treat it as though it were imaginary.)

“Don’t forget your hat, Herr Doktor,” the captain said, taking my elbow and steering me out the door. On the street, he added: “You should lock up, don’t you think? To discourage vandals,” he explained.

Ah, that’s how it is with Germans, I thought. They think nothing of killing a man, but every door must be locked and every window bolted. I banished this thought from my mind, however. There was no profit in feeling superior to a man who, literally or figuratively, has a gun pointed at one’s back.

“Down this street,” the captain said, a step behind me. Though I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face, I was exquisitely aware of his presence — the thudding of his boots, the rasping of his breath — and I trembled each time he touched my elbow to steer me this way or that. Against his solid hand, I was embarrassed to feel my own insubstantial trembling.

“Only a little farther, Herr Doktor.”

“And where, may I ask, is the good captain taking me?”

“Never mind. Never you mind that.” He spat.

I considered pestering him with questions in order to make his job as unpleasant as possible, but found I lacked the spirit for the game. Besides, it was impossible to awaken a conscience in an enemy without one. I looked at the sky above the rows of tired old houses, at the midwinter sun struggling up behind them. I tried to remain philosophical: all the attention I’d lavished upon my life, all the care I’d taken with its every detail, and this is where it had gotten me.

Hadn’t I had enough of these old hurts, these old wounds, and all the comical feints they’d inspired? Perhaps Ita had been right all along, perhaps it was better to jump into the next life, as into a pool of water, and emerge from the other side, newly reborn. (If, on the other hand, as we’d seen with Ita, one merely enters one’s new life with a new iteration of one’s old problems, surrounded by reincarnated versions of the people one once knew, there seemed little point in dying.)

“Up these stairs, Herr Doktor. Careful now. There’s a tricky step.” I considered running for it, but being shot in the street at that moment seemed less preferable than being shot in an interrogation room twenty minutes later. “In here, in here,” he said, pushing me through the door of an apartment. “Sit!” he barked, and I sat. He walked past me and, as he did, he lifted my hat from my head and dropped it onto my lap. Grinning obscenely, he rapped with his knuckles against an interior door.

“Fine, fine,” a voice answered him from within.

For the first time, I felt free to study my captor. A typical specimen, I thought, barrel-chested with powerful shoulders. On closer inspection, he appeared slightly stooped, as though the effort of standing erect was costing him dearly. His face was wide and jowly. There was something almost feral about him. He seemed a wild, ferocious dog.

Having received his answer at the door, he took a seat behind me — I could hear the legs of his chair creaking beneath his weight — and I imagined that would be the last I’d see of him.

Soon, I thought, he’ll put a bullet through my head.

THE DOOR OPENED,
and a second man entered the room. “Ah!” he said, seeing the two of us together. “Excellent work, brother.”

I must say: this fellow couldn’t have been more different from the first. Trim and dignified, he wore a precise little beard on the point of his chin. It was silver, as was his elegant pompadour. His black vest was still unbuttoned and he was busily rolling down his shirtsleeves. He looked as if he’d just finished his morning shave. “So you’ve managed to find our good doctor, have you? Marvelous! No, no, Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t get up, don’t get up!” he said, extending his hand and moving towards my chair. “You haven’t changed a bit. Has he, brother? Not a bit. Ah, but it’s extraordinary to see you again!”

It’s extraordinary to see me again? Did I know these men? I looked about the apartment, at the table and the sofa, at the antique lamp glowing on the desk. None of it seemed familiar. I peered into the face of the man standing before me. He smiled expectantly, his eyes gleaming behind a thick pair of black-rimmed glasses. His lower teeth were crooked, and this gave his chin an asymmetrical, though not an unattractive cast.

“Ha! He’s amazed!” the captain chortled behind me.

“Astonished is more like it,” the other fellow said, peering diagnostically into my eyes.

“It never fails!”

“It never does, does it?”

“I … I’m sorry,” I stammered, “but I don’t recall our ever having met.”

“He doesn’t recall our ever having met!” The captain hawked up a vulgar laugh. The other fellow shook his head and tutted his tongue.

“They tend to forget,” he said.

“Human beings, he means,” the captain whispered in my ear.

“They forget that they’ve forgotten.

“And then that is forgotten as well.”

I’m hallucinating from hunger, was my next thought.

“Possibly,” the man in the vest agreed, although I was certain I hadn’t spoken these words aloud. Or perhaps they’ve already murdered me, I thought.

“No, I can assure you that hasn’t happened yet.”

“Yet?” I said.

And with that, he began to laugh, and his companion, the hulking
dog-man standing behind me, began to laugh as well, and that glorious sound, a sound I remembered having heard only once before — at the side of Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital bed — filled the dingy little apartment until I couldn’t keep from giggling myself. “I’m not hallucinating, then?” I said.

“Oh, well, no, we never said you weren’t! There are many avenues into the true world, Dr. Sammelsohn, and hallucination has a long and noble tradition.”

“More reliable than dreams,”
growled.

“On the contrary, don’t believe him, Dr. Sammelsohn. His is the minority opinion.”

“But it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s he who hasn’t kept up with the literature.”

braised
with a searing scowl. “Must you contradict everything I say?”

“I don’t contradict everything you say. However, in this case, Dr. Sammelsohn, he’s incorrect, and the scholarly conclusions are mixed.”

The two angels glared at each other with such ferocity that I feared they’d come to blows, but then they began to laugh again, and I couldn’t help laughing as well, and once again, that delicious golden sound filled the room. My shoulders relaxed, my belly unknotted, and tears began streaming down my face.

HELD OUT
a starched kerchief. “Aw, here you go, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

“Thank you.” I said, and drying my tears, I apologized for my weeping.

“Oh, no, no, tush, tush! Don’t be silly,”
said.

“We sympathize completely,”
said. “The passage of time” — he made a small rolling gesture with his hand — “the sense of loss.”

“Not to mention,”
nodded towards the window, “these deplorable conditions.”

My brain was on fire. I seemed to have only the slightest idea of what was taking place before me. My medical training, as well as the time I’d spent with Dr. Freud, made me believe, as I told myself it was reasonable to believe, that I’d undergone a psychic fracturing of some kind. Confronted with the brutality I was doubtlessly at that moment experiencing
at the hands of my torturers or fearing I would in the next moment experience, my mind had retreated into a world of fantasy where sense could seem to be made of it all. Still, amazed to hear myself, I next said,
— but why on earth are you here?”