A Curable Romantic (90 page)

“I know you don’t believe us, Dr. Sammelsohn, but your love has transformed her.”

“My love!” I could only scoff. “Gentlemen, surely you’re mocking me. When I review my life, my principal regret is that Zusha the Amalekite didn’t succeed in strangling Ita with his shoestring!”

shrugged. “Fine. Regret it. It wouldn’t have done you any good. She’d only have been reborn again.”

“Correct.”

“And again.”

“We don’t call them gilgulim for nothing.” He made a circular motion with his hand.

I gathered my collars against the cold and pulled my hat brim down. Was there any point in allowing myself to be hoodwinked by these two — what were they even? — phantoms? angels? psychoid disturbances? Did I even wish to see Ita again? It was a question I hadn’t even bothered asking myself in the wild tumult of events. Why would I want to see her? She’d been a disaster from first to last. As herself, she’d wrecked my childhood; as a dybbuk, she’d destroyed my romance with Fräulein Eckstein; as a miserable street urchin, she’d sabotaged my marriage to Loë while bringing down the Esperanto movement and (if the angels were to be believed) delaying the arrival of the Messiah! What possible good could come from meeting her in a fourth incarnation even if, as
and
assured me now, she’d repented of her evil ways?

“No, I’ve had enough of this!” I cried. “I refuse to be made a fool of by my own hallucinations!” I began to stand, but
thudded the back of his fist against my chest and forced me back onto the park bench.

“Look!” he said. “There she is now!” He pointed to a woman who was leaving an apartment house across the way. She stood at the top of the building’s exterior stairs, buttoning her coat before descending to the sidewalk. She looked in both directions at the curb before committing to the street, as the usual ghetto traffic, more rickshaws than cars by that time, sped by.

“Ah.”
nodded gently. “I’d forgotten how lovely she’s become.”
gave him a stern look. “What’s happening to you here, brother?”

“Why, whatever do you mean?”

“Don’t let this little masquerade of ours go to your head.”

I paid their argument little mind. My attention was riveted on the young woman. She wore a white medical smock beneath her winter coat and was carrying a black medical bag.

“The limp” — whispering,
directed my attention to her irregular gait — “has carried over, you see.”

“As we told you,”
whispered in my other ear, “she’s a doctor.”

“And what does she do — murder her patients?”

“No, Heaven forbid!”
exclaimed. “She’s completely reformed herself, Dr. Sammelsohn! How many times must we tell you that?”

I nearly got up to greet the woman, but she walked right past us, paying no attention to me or to my companions.

“Oh, this is all nonsense!” I cried. Nevertheless, with the angels trailing behind me, I followed her for a block, keeping a respectable distance between us.
was correct: despite the brutality of the times and the wasting effect it was having upon all of us, despite the limp, which made of her walking an asymmetrical affair, she moved with a pleasing femininity. As I reduced the distance between us, I could see that beneath her hat, her hair was sensibly pinned and, despite her youth, streaked with grey.

First she and then I rounded a corner and simultaneously we caught sight of a soldier. The young doktershe turned around so quickly, she was walking straight towards me or (why not give in to the madness?) straight towards the three of us. In fact, she nearly walked into me, and as she did, she eyed me, I thought, with an odd flash of recognition. Having confirmed on closer inspection that she did not know me after all, she shook her head, seeming quite literally to be shaking off the impression.

“Doktershe,” I said, greeting her with a tip of my hat.

“Ah! Ah, ha! Dr. Sammelsohn, did you see? Did you see that?”
said, as the young woman moved past us and disappeared into the crowd.