A Curable Romantic (21 page)

“Good Lord, Fräulein! Is that you?”

She said nothing. Her eyes were nearly closed, her jaw slack, and her mouth opened slightly. She reminded me of a blind man I’d seen as a child in a railway station. Abandoned by his companions, he moved tentatively, taking each step as though the floor beneath him might open up at any moment and the earth swallow him. As with the blind man, something prevented me from immediately offering Fräulein Eckstein my aid. She was sleepwalking. I hadn’t realized this at first. Indeed, she was in as advanced a state of somnambulism as I had ever seen. Surely even Dr. Freud wouldn’t insist I send her away in such a precarious state. On the contrary, my calling as a doctor demanded that I take the opposite tack. The little I knew of somnambulism suggested it was best neither to startle nor awaken the Fräulein. On the other hand, I couldn’t very well leave a young woman, clad only in her nightclothes, standing at the door of my apartment and continue to live with my neighbors’ approval.

“Come in, come in, you look frozen,” I said as gently I could. To my relief, she took a small step forward. She hesitated as though puzzled at hearing my voice, but finally she crossed the threshold. I peered into the hallway before closing the door. No one was there. Fräulein Eckstein moved into the room, swaying slightly. Though her eyes were now completely closed, she managed somehow to avoid the furniture, a feat all the more remarkable as she’d never been inside my rooms before.

“Do you mind?” she said, sitting at the table beneath the lamp, where earlier in the evening I’d been reading Dr. Fliess’s
On the Causal Connection between the Nose and the Sexual Organ.
Fräulein Eckstein picked up the book and tossed it aside. “Why do you read such rubbish?” she asked, still quite asleep.

I shrugged, wondering if the silent gesture would register with her in any way. However, there was nothing to say in the book’s defense.

“Yankl,” she said, sighing pleasurably.

“Yes, Fräulein?”

“Do you hear it?”

“Hear what, Fräulein?”

“The wedding music.”

I shook my head.

“I’m listening to it now,” she said. “Are you?”

“I’m not.”

“And why not?”

“Because I can’t hear it, I suppose.”

Her brow puckered. “And why is that?”

“Well, I’m certain I don’t know.”

It’s an unsettlingly intimate thing to sit with a person whose eyes are closed. Observing while unobserved, the eye takes in things it otherwise might never see. I leaned in closer to Fräulein Eckstein and looked at the little blue twigs of veins inside her lowered eyelids, the skin of which seemed more red and roughened than the rest of her face. Perhaps she’s been crying, was my initial thought.

“Do you know how difficult it was to find you here, Yankl?”

“Here, in my rooms, Fräulein?”

“I’ve been walking and walking.”

“I hope you haven’t caught a cold.”

“And no one saw me.”

“No?”

“Because it’s night.”

“Ah, yes, that’s very clever of you.”

“I slept during the day.”

“Did you?”

“Whenever I could.”

“Although perhaps we shouldn’t talk so much until you’ve properly awakened.”

“In haystacks, in barns. I didn’t know where I was going exactly or where I’d find you.”

She sat with her back rigid and her hands on the table, one atop the other. So flat and lifeless, they almost resembled gloves. I played with my slipper, snapping my ankle, lifting my heel in and out of the shoe, a nervous habit. Neither of us spoke again for a minute, and I listened to the grandfather clock, ticking with its slight irregularity, in the corner of the room.

Finally she said, “Do you see them, Yankl?”

“See whom, Fräulein?”

“You don’t then?”

“No.”

“Do you see them now?”

“I see no one.”

“Good.”

“Is it?”

“Perhaps I’ve eluded them.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Do you?”

“Very much so.”

“Because I thought you might blame me.”

“Blame you, Fräulein? But for what?”

“Oh God!” She startled.

“What is it?”

“They’re here!” She trembled. “Are they here?” She turned her head, listening. “I think they’re here!”

“No, no one is here, Fräulein,” I said, but as I tried to reassure her, her breathing quickened and grew short. She lifted the backs of her hands to her face and held them there, as though shielding her eyes from an inordinately brilliant light. “I’ve harmed no one!” she called to whatever presence she imagined confronting her. “I’ve harmed no one but myself!” She stood. “It is owed me!” she cried. “Do you hear me? It is
owed
to me!” As though struck, she fell to the floor, cowering beneath her chair, sheltering there, or so it appeared to me, from a rain of invisible blows.

I stood and paced in frantic steps, first towards the door, then towards her recumbent figure, then towards the door again, undecided which was best — summoning help or seeing to her myself. Throwing medical caution to the wind, forgetting in my fear the old wives’ tales (or was it hard, medical fact?) that forbade waking a sleepwalker, I grabbed her by her shoulders — her head was beneath the chair, her torso confined between two of its legs — and I shook her. “Fräulein! You must awaken!” I cried, but her convulsions worsened at my touch. As though beaten and kicked from every side, she screamed out, raging incomprehensibly, holding out her arm, reaching for my hand, as might a sailor being devoured by sharks before the eyes of his helpless crewmates. “Fräulein Eckstein,” I cried again, and her trembling ceased immediately. Her arms, which had been protecting her head, fell away; the hinges of her elbows unlocked, her head dropped. I lifted the chair from over her and, kneeling again, supported her back, helping her to sit up. “Can you hear me?”

She opened her eyes. “Dr. Sammelsohn?” She expressed these two words as a question.

“Yes, Fräulein, it is I.”

She looked searchingly into my face, as though trying to decipher a Chinese ideogram, then glanced about the room. “Oh, oh, but … how … ?” Sitting up, she gathered the collar of her gown. Looking at my nightclothes and at my robe, and then at her own nightclothes, she screamed — “God in Heaven, no!” — before fainting dead away. She couldn’t have been more distressed had she regained consciousness in
an opium den lying in the arms of a white slaver, it seemed. I picked her up, not an easy feat — she weighed nearly as much as I — and carried her into my bedroom, where I laid her down in my bed. I glanced out the window. It must have been nearly four in the morning. Though the sky was still dark, I knew there was only one thing to do: I must summon Sigmund Freud, her rightful physician, immediately. Making a quick calculus, however, I resolved to put off doing so for another few hours, until dawn, at least. The Fräulein could sleep in my bed. The poor girl had obviously exhausted herself. I would sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. As for Dr. Freud, whatever he could do for her at four in the morning, snatched out of his warm bed, groggy and ill tempered, he could do far better after a full night’s sleep, or such was my reasoning.

Making certain Fräulein Eckstein was comfortable, I injected her with a hypodermic of a strong sleeping draught, which I kept in my medical bag. She relaxed, and her breathing lengthened. I covered her with blankets and made to leave the room. As I was about to close the door behind me, however, she startled me by addressing me in a voice that was alert and strong. “Yankl,” she said.

“Yes, Fräulein?” I turned back, bending in through the doorway, staring at her form inside the darkened chamber of the room.

“There’s no need to sleep so far away from me.”

“Ah, yes, well, I think it’s better that I do, Fräulein, and in the morning, I’ll see to it that you arrive safely home.”

(Perhaps the choral was old, I told myself, its potency expired.)

“Come lie with me, Yankl,” she said.

“Fräulein.”

“Please, because I’m so cold!”

I took my hand off the knob. “You’re not cold,” I told her. “It’s the hypodermic I administered to you that’s making you feel cold, that’s all.”

“But I
am
cold,” she complained like a lost child. “I walked barefoot in the snow.”

“Then I’ll bring you an extra blanket.”

“Open a light, if you don’t believe me, and I’ll show you the gooseflesh on my arms.”

From this point on, my dear reader, I have nothing to say in my own
defense and will make no attempt to justify anything I did that night. Telling myself I wished only to help her, as might any doctor in these circumstances, I lit a candle, believing its amber light would soothe her mind more calmingly than would the gas. The flame created an impenetrable shadow outside the oval of its light, and I could see Fräulein Eckstein inside the flickering penumbra, lying in the rumpled bedsheets. Her chemise was unlaced from its collar to its hem, and I couldn’t help tracing with my eyes the lines of perspective that plunged across the rosy white expanse of her chest and her plump belly and the long stark avenues of her naked legs converging, as though in a single vanishing point, at the wild riot of curly black hair in her lap. She smiled almost imperceptibly, in triumph it seemed, one corner of her cheek and a single eyebrow rising. I couldn’t help gasping at her beauty. She carefully opened the bodice of her chemise a bit farther, and her breasts commanded my attention as would two roses in a snowy field. A tingling needled my spine, more precisely than the needles of any Chinese doctor. I felt myself a character in a fairy tale, summoned to the bed of a wolf disguised as a sorceress. My hand trembled so, the flame guttered, extinguished in its own wax, and the vision of Fräulein Eckstein disappeared.

I struggled in the pitch to relight the taper.

“Yankl,” she said, visible once again inside the flickering amber light.

I took a step towards the bed, convincing whatever part of me needed convincing that I was approaching her only for the purposes of carrying out a thorough medical examination.

“Fräulein Eckstein, you’re sick,” I told her, “you’re ill.”

She shook her head. “On the contrary, I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“However, we mustn’t do anything we might regret.”

“No, I want to regret things, Yankl. Make me regret everything.”

I swallowed nervously. “Very well then. Yes, I see. But you must understand that I promised Dr. Freud I wouldn’t see you again.”

“Dr. Freud!” she laughed out the name. “What a horse’s ass!”

“He cares only for your well-being.”

“He cares only for Dr. Fliess, and the worst part of it is he doesn’t
even know how lovesick he is — oh, the poor ridiculous puppy! ‘Wilhelm this and Wilhelm that and, oh, my darling magician.’ ” She imitated Dr. Freud’s voice to perfection. “It’s really too disgusting!”

As tempting as it was to discuss Dr. Freud’s incomprehensible admiration for the person of Wilhelm Fliess with another person as galled by it as I, I knew this was neither the appropriate time nor a suitable place.

“Perhaps Dr. Freud sees more deeply into Dr. Fleiss’s character than you or I are able to,” I said simply.

“Lie with me, Yankl,” she said, quite suddenly.

“No, Fräulein,” I demurred.

“Let me be a wife to you.”

Not knowing how to respond, I chose my words carefully, speaking in my most medically avuncular manner: “I admit it’s difficult in a situation such as ours, not to lose one’s head …”

“No, lose it, Yankl,” Fräulein Eckstein said, “and I’ll lose mine as well.”

My father had warned me against such women, and now his face appeared before me, its pinched, saturnine features, its thin mouth screwed down into a bilious frown, its nostrils curled as though against an odious stench. The face of a scold, colored in the dark hues of rebuke, it filled me with a half-forgotten bitterness for the way he’d insinuated himself between Hindele and me following our wedding. I’d resolved never to let him stand between me and a woman again. Before I could banish his caviling glare from my oculus mentis, Dr. Freud’s face appeared there as well (as I’m certain it would in the coming century to anyone approaching Eros’s sordid bed). Pert with derision, he leered at me like an anatomist peering into the eviscerated bowels of a cadaver, his face alert with disgust and fascination.

I reacted as negatively against Dr. Freud as I did against my own father: Who were these men to tell me who I could and could not consort with? True, I told myself, Fräulein Eckstein was in the thrall of a manic hysteria with elements of psychosis, but it’s equally true that her madness only enhanced her beauty. She seemed a wild, ravishing thing, an animal, strong and omnivorous in her passions.

“What is it, Fräulein, you would have me do?” I asked, standing at her bedside. “Consider me your servant.”

“Unsash your robe,” she commanded me.

Betraying these betraying fathers, I obeyed her, my hands working as if on their own.

“Now shrug it off your shoulders and let it fall to the floor.”

I did as she requested.

“Unbutton your nightshirt.”

For that, I had to settle the candle on the table. Having done so, I complied, my hands, nervous and jittery, fumbling at their work.

“Now pull it off over your head.”

Beneath my robe and nightshirt, I wore long lavender drawers, fashioned from lamb’s wool. (These were extraordinarily warm in winter.) Fräulein Eckstein’s eyes dropped vulgarly and once again she laughed that small, pleased, whorish laugh I’d heard that afternoon in the opera box. “Come here,” she said.

My various garments about my feet, I hobbled towards her like a convict in leg irons. How may I put this without offending? Propped onto her elbow, she unbuttoned the lamb’s wool and rummaged delicately through its central pouch, untangling the bobbin from the skein, as it were, firmly coercing what she found there to its full extension if not (such are the unfortunate effects of a lifelong abstinence) beyond. In truth, all this made me not a little uncomfortable. It wasn’t so much the raw stark fact of my manhood negotiating the space between us — I’d never been held so matter-of-factly by a woman (or by anyone else for that matter) and though the attention my nether member received, at turns admiring and judicious, was not entirely unwelcome, nor were the many things its presence in the open air seemed to promise — still, this was an entirely different Emma Eckstein from the one I imagined I knew. I had previously thought her a typical höhere Tochter, a sweet woman-child, an innocent daughter, frazzled by her own femininity, an angel in the house, not the sort of wharf trull one encounters in the shadowy docks of Hamburg’s rougher districts! Her vulgarity repulsed me and unstiffened my ardor. I swooned in confusion, not understanding how we’d gotten so quickly to this pass, and more than a part of me felt manipulated. My legs buckled, and I fell onto the edge of the bed. Keeping a small distance between us, I again stationed the candle in its holder
on the table. For her part, lying next to me, she allowed her hand to fall against my thigh, its back nuzzling my crotch. Mesmerized against my will by her flesh, I reached out to her and, with a trembling hand, stroked her belly. She breathed in sharply, her gaze, beneath her slitted eyelids, never leaving mine. Her pelvis lifted involuntarily, as though an unseen hand had thrust her womanhood towards me. Daring to kiss her there, I again heard the same sharp intake of breath, like the sound of water hitting a hot griddle. With a startling quickness, she was on her knees and forearms, facing me, like a cat with its back caved in.