A Curable Romantic (24 page)

At times, I found myself envying the puppets, and not only for their lightness and agility. Though their limbs were wooden and their bodies fashioned from the flimsiest of fabrics, each was animated by a defining spirit, each exulted in his own character, reveling in it, as it were, no matter how many flaws it contained. It was exactly the opposite of real life: the sillier the puppet, the more trouble he brewed, the more joy he created, and the more beloved he became. No one asks a puppet to reform his character or to improve it through psychoanalysis, and though he may find himself a social outcast in the middle of the play, by its end, all will be right with him again, though he will have, in the meantime, learned nothing at all.

Sitting among the children, I reimagined my debacle with Dr. Freud as though it were being performed by marionettes. Half-daydreaming, I watched a marionette version of myself on the little stage falling in love with a marionette modeled on Fräulein Eckstein. From the breast pocket of Otto Meissenblichler’s suit, too large for my wooden frame, occasionally bursts a velvet heart fastened to my chest by a spring. The stage is a reproduction of the Carl in precise trompe l’oeil. With a herky-jerky gait, tangling up in my strings, my enormous papier-mâché head filled with dreams, I rush down the stairs of the theater, searching for the beautiful marionette in her lavender dress, only to encounter a sinister Dr. Freud, smoking at the bar. O, what a villain is he! O, how easily one can recognize his villainy when he has been transformed into a puppet! Why, just look at that pointy beard and those glinting eyes and the
Mephistophelean cigar and the red devil’s tail that continually escapes from a patch in the back of his pants with a loud
spronggg!
As a puppet, I’m as oblivious to his devilry as I was as a man in actual life. However, the delight my obliviousness creates in the audience of screaming children is a comfort to me.

“Would you like to come play cards at my house on Saturday night, eh?” Dr. Freud asks, and through a mechanism only Herr Franz understands, smoke actually comes out of his painted mouth.

“No! No! Don’t do it!” the children scream from their benches, all mad limbs and terrified shrieks.

“Don’t do it, children? Is that what you’re saying?” I bounce lightly on my wooden knees, the string that lifts my hand lifts it to my head, and I scratch it in confusion.

“Yessss!” the children scream.

“Yes?” I feign bewilderment. “Yes or no? Which is it now?”

“Yes!”

“All right then, ‘yes’ it is.” I turn back to Dr. Freud. “Why, I’d be delighted, simply honored, thoroughly and extraordinarily so, to come.”

“Then I’ll see you at eight. Sharp!” He leers, smoke steaming out his ears.

“At eight,” I say, floating offstage. “At last my loneliness is over!”

The stage reddens with a hellish glow. Bobbing wickedly at the end of his web of strings, Dr. Freud confronts the audience of booing children. “You almost gave me away there, Kinderlach. But thankfully, Dr. Sammelsohn is as thick as the wood from which he’s cut. Now, all I have to do is introduce him to Fräulein Eckstein, and his heart, that shabby pillow he keeps hidden behind his breast pocket, will be broken into a thousand pieces!” He laughs a devilish laugh: “Maw-haw-haw-haw-haw!” His strings slacken, and he bows evilly.

The children hiss and hoot.

(It’s foolish, I know, to assume I’d be the central character in this comedy. Devil or saint, as far as history is concerned, Dr. Freud is always the star. And where do I imagine I’ll end up, except as a tangled heap of string and fabric, moldering in the puppet trunk of history?)

CHAPTER 13

Dr. Freud had been emphatic that he never wished to see me again. He couldn’t have made his desire less ambiguous had he nailed it, as a proclamation, onto the doors of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and so I was very much surprised, late one evening in March, as I was leaving the clinic, to receive a telephone call from him, requesting that I come immediately to his home.

“Or I can come round to get you, whichever is the quicker.”

“No, I’ll come to you,” I said, still, after everything, deferential. However one might characterize the various stages of our acquaintance (surely not now as a friendship), he was always its senior partner.

“Take a fiacre, and I’ll pay for it. And have the driver wait for us both outside.”

I gathered up my medical bag and locked the examination room and bundled into my coat. I made my way to the street, where, after a short while, I was able to flag down a cab. Dr. Freud’s home was near the clinic, and while I rode, I barely had time to think through this extraordinary development. Why, hardly a month ago, I’d been exiled by Dr. Freud, as though by the tsar, to the northernmost reaches of a social Siberia, and yet here I was, roused from the dead and summoned urgently back. Had my case been reviewed? Had I been found innocent of all charges? Or had Dr. Freud, digging through my file, merely discovered a new crime with which to charge me? I had little time to agonize over these concerns. I knew only that my throat was dry in anticipation. I asked the driver to wait at the curb, and I made my way into Berggasse 19. I had barely knocked at number 6, when Dr. Freud was at the door.

“Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, you’ve arrived.”

Forgive me, reader, if I belabor these five words:
Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, you’ve arrived.
For the life of me, I couldn’t mock out their deeper meaning. Was Dr. Freud glad to see me? Did he, in uttering them, mean to
express,
Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, thank goodness, you’ve arrived
? Or did something of his previous vexation darken their intent:
Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, so here you are again, turned up like a bad penny
? His Tarock face gave nothing away, and I didn’t know whether to throw myself upon his bosom, the prodigal son returned, or to remain distant, braced for further scolding. Also what matchingly bland phrase could I utter in return to cover the entire spectrum of his possible meanings?

“Yes, I’ve come,” I said, keeping well away from him on the landing.

“There’s so much you didn’t tell me.”

He turned to lock the door of his apartment. I stuck my hands into my coat pockets, where they might at least jangle my keys.

“I suppose I might have left out a bit of the sexual parts, it’s true …”

“A bit?”

“Rather
all
of the sexual parts.”

“I’d suspected as much,” he said, dropping his keys into his own pocket. “And though you may feel the penitent’s need to unburden his breast, I assure you I’ve no confessor’s wish to hear the illicit details, and happily, except perhaps tangentially, your malfeasance in the case of Fräulein Eckstein is not at issue here.”

He took my arm and escorted me down the staircase. Once again, I was hard-pressed to interpret the gesture: was he holding me, as one might a beloved friend, or as a jailor would a fugitive who could suddenly bolt? In either case, I felt constrained.

“On the contrary,” Dr. Freud murmured, “I’m speaking of your wife.”

“Of Hindele?”

“Rather of Ita.” He purred the name into my ear, and my entire being went cold. In truth, I almost fainted. Indeed, had he not been holding my arm, I’m certain I would have tumbled onto the cobbles of the sidewalk. This was a name Dr. Freud and I had never spoken between us.

“Of Ita?” I repeated. I searched his face for clues.

“Let us get into the fiacre, Yankl, where we can talk more intimately.”

How many thoughts can aggravate a man’s brain at once? A hundred, two hundred, a thousand, more? At that moment, of those thousand buzzing, humming, blundering thoughts, I was aware of only one:
a desire to break from Dr. Freud and to run as far from him as I could. Unschooled in blatant arrogance, alas, I’d made a habit of ignoring my inner wishes or, more precisely, of concealing them inside a pantomime of decorum. I could no more act upon my desires with immediacy than I could break into a yodel in the middle of the Heldenplatz. Further: Dr. Freud’s will was suppler than my own. Whereas another man might have bridled at his ambush with a stern counterattack —
As soon as you explain to me what this is all about, my dear fellow, then I’ll happily accompany you
— or resisted him with more force and still been justified —
Kindly put it in a letter to my solicitor
— even had these replies occurred to me then, and not, as they did, long afterwards, I would have lacked the courage to utter them.
As you wish
is all it occurred to me to say.

“As you wish,” I did in fact say, as Dr. Freud opened the door of the fiacre and, extending his arm, made certain I climbed in before him.

(It occurred to me to climb immediately out the other door and to sprint away, but to commit such an act, I’d have to have been a puppet in a commedia, and not a flesh and blood man in the farce he was making of his own life. And though I knew the chase would have delighted an audience of children, I also knew that the inexorable laws of drama would have demanded my capture, as apparently did the laws of God Himself.)

I leaned back against the seat and threw aside the woolen blanket, waiting for my nemesis to clamber in. Dr. Freud bellowed up an address to the driver and shut and locked the door. We sat side by side, he taking up more room than I, his elbow pinioning my arm against the seat. Perhaps the cocaine had anaesthetized his senses. In any case, he seemed unaware of the pressure he was exerting upon my arm.

The sun had set, and the lamplighters were about their sooty business. A freezing drizzle had crept in. The city was dismal and gloomy. There were few others on the streets, and the lonesome clip-clop of our horses’ hooves resounding against the buildings chilled my bones.

Dr. Freud sighed and looked out the window on my side of the carriage. “You never told me about Ita,” he said, glancing past me through the sleet-spotted glass.

“Has someone contacted you?”

I wouldn’t have put it past her grandfather to have tracked me down in order to blackmail me by revealing everything to my new important friends. Of course, unless Zusha the Amalekite were a devotee of obscure neurological journals, he’d have never heard of Sigmund Freud. In any case, my fears were unfounded. Zusha, as I recall, was illiterate, in German as well as in the seventy other languages of the world.

“I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” I told Dr. Freud.

“Nor have you reason to be.”

“However, I was a child.”

“As we all were once.”

“Not yet thirteen.”

“At sixteen, Alexander had conquered the world.”

Gaslight from a streetlamp, as we passed it, fell across Dr. Freud’s brow. He squinted, momentarily blinded, before returning his gaze to me. “I’m afraid I’ll need to know everything. If you care at all for Fräulein Eckstein, Dr. Sammelsohn, your help will be essential because, frankly, I’m in over my head.”

“But what has Ita got to do with all of this?”

“That will be made clear, my dear boy, but later, when we have the leisure to go into the thing in depth. First, I’ll need to know from you, honestly and without expurgation, all that occurred between you and the girl.”

“Between Fräulein Eckstein and myself?”

He shook his head. “Between you and this Ita.”

“But Ita has nothing to do with Fräulein Eckstein or her hysteria, I assure you!”

Dr. Freud scowled from behind his whiskers.

“I promise you, Dr. Sammelsohn, all will be rendered clear. But a good deal of that clarity depends upon a frank and forthright confession from yourself.”

“A confession?”

“That is perhaps an ill-chosen word.”

“I’ve committed no crime.”

“I didn’t mean it in its juridical sense.”

“I’ve done nothing with which to reproach myself. Neither with Fräulein Eckstein nor with Ita!”

“Ah.” Dr. Freud dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his eyes with the meat of his palms until the gesture produced a small clicking sound. “The treacherous byways of the unseen world have perhaps put me into too ecclesiastical a mood. If so, forgive me.” Lifting his head, he cast his now red-rimmed eyes over me. His voice creaked with emotion. “Dr. Sammelsohn, I don’t by any means pretend to understand the entirety of human consciousness. In this regard, I’m very like one of those ancient cartographers who limned, with their gouaches and their oils, the boundaries of the then-known world. Though skilled sufficiently in their arts to encompass the globe, their work depended fundamentally upon the reports they received from men who set out to explore those regions, and whose work, in turn, depended upon the whim of this or that monarch or, later, upon the heads of some shipping or trading firm, who, in the first case, lusting for gold or spice, and in the second, for navigable trade routes, desired accurate maps to enable them to return to the new lands they’d conquered. In our young science, the cartography of the human psyche depends equally upon many such serendipities: the caprices of the maladies that afflict our patients; the caprices of the patients themselves, who may or may not seek treatment or who may or may not seek treatment from me; even then, what a patient chooses to reveal about herself in analysis depends upon a thousand and one incalculable factors, not excluding which tie or cologne I happen to be wearing that day and what memories these bring to mind. In this way, I’m not unlike Anaximander or Mercator or Americus Vesputius, those mapmakers who, for their work, relied upon the integrity and the veracity and the mathematical precision of their informants, most of which, one can only presume, were lacking. And just as these ancient cartographers might, at the limits of their knowledge, spell out the legend
Beware! Beyond this border: demons!
, so too the ancient psychologist, the priests and abbots of their day, faced with the vexing hysterias and neuroses of their parishioners, and the wild behaviors these diseases occasioned, imagined in them the thing they feared the most: demonical possession. Let me be blunt, Dr. Sammelsohn, there is no difference in outward appearance between a case of severe hysteria and one of demonical possession. But I confess to you, at the risk of sounding like a lunatic myself, that although
I know Fräulein Eckstein is suffering from the former, from all appearances, she seems to be in the grips of the latter.”