A Curable Romantic (33 page)

“The look on his face was unbearable to see: it was the face of a man who’d gone too far and who now understood that his actions were irrevocable. Far worse was the look on your mother’s face: bitter, accusing, naked, perhaps for the first time, of all illusion. She saw her husband as
she’d never seen him before: as the man who had now irreversibly embittered her life. If, in this instance, I, a mere village idiot, could see their entire life passing between them, as though in a moment of divine judgment, what did the others in our little mob of outraged citizens see with their fuller powers of comprehension? The exasperation knitted into your mother’s brow seemed to say:
It’s bad enough, oh, it’s bad enough, all these years, you’ve gone out into the forest like a madman with your poems, and we humored you; you’ve hungered after that repulsive little troll Blume Levanthal and I ignored it; but now you’ve driven my only son from our house, and I can no longer bear you!

“You could almost hear the one small chamber of her heart still open with affection towards him buckling. He seemed crushed. His beard seemed to whiten before our eyes. The hook of his scholar’s stoop, always rounded like a question mark, ceased signifying intellectual inquiry and now broadcast dumbfounded incomprehension. As for myself, I became aware of the fact that everyone in the room was looking at me. I understood I was a problem without a solution, a bloody mark upon their lintel signifying to the Angel of Life that he may as well pass over their houses and withhold his blessings. To your father, I was proof of what an ornery fool he was. To your mother, I was a hostage who would never be redeemed, held in captivity forever against the return of her son. I seemed to have exchanged a family who wished me dead for a family who wished I’d never been born. I was moving up in the world, but at that moment that thought was of little comfort to me. All I could think of was you, Yankl. Yes, you! Oh, how I loved you! How I wanted you! Oh, and the children I wanted to give you! As tempers reached their boiling point, as accusations and recriminations, long simmering, bubbled over, while no one was looking, indeed while your father and mother were arguing over what was to be done with me, I slipped out. Nobody saw me, or if they did, no one alerted anyone else, and I made my way to the river. For where else do heartbroken girls go?”

“Ita,” I said softly, “tell me you didn’t.”

“Drowning myself was easy, Yankele. No one had ever taught me how to swim, and I’d heard enough love stories to know that at the moment
I jumped into the waters from a rocky ledge, you would appear on the horizon to save me.”

“You
drowned
yourself? Ita!”

Fräulein Eckstein’s face reddened with the memory. “The water was cold, and I was crying, of course. I was a foolish girl. Crying as the water covered me like a goose-down quilt on a cold winter’s night. ‘This will be my wedding bed,’ I told myself dramatically. ‘These hard river rocks will be my pillows.’ I grew drowsy and, for a moment, I slept.”

Dr. Freud lifted his eyes from his notes. His pen stopped scratching. We both waited for her to continue.

“But only for a moment.” She smiled, in triumph, like Scheherazade, content to hold her listeners in a chasm of silence between one part of her story and the next.

“And after that?” I finally said.

“Well, after that,” she said, “I was no longer cold, nor wet, nor even in the river. I sat upon its banks, watching the poor, wretched girl below me. She looked like a rag doll that had been tossed into a puddle by a careless child. ‘Who is that unfortunate girl?’ I asked, not expecting a reply, and so I was stunned to hear a voice very near my ear whispering, ‘She doesn’t concern you anymore.’ “

CHAPTER 16

And who was it who spoke these words to you?”

“Oh, Yankl, I’d never seen anyone so beautiful!”

“Yes, but who was it?” I insisted.

“Impossible to say!” Once again, she was on her knees on the bed, her arms spread wide apart, describing the scene. “Because the being had four faces.”

“Four faces? Ita!”

“A man’s, a woman’s, a lion’s, and a child’s — oh, and magnificent fiery wings!”

I glanced across Fräulein Eckstein’s sickbed and met Dr. Freud’s skeptical expression. With his eyebrows raised, he seemed to be stroking the inside of his cheek with his tongue. Ita didn’t notice, however, and continued with her story.

“It dropped its cloak about my shoulders and pulled me away from the water.

“ ‘There’s no time to mourn now,’ the woman said.

“When I refused to budge, the lion produced a mirror from inside the cloak, and the child held it to my face.

“ ‘Look,’ the bearded man commanded me. And, oh, Yankl!” Ita raised her hands to her cheeks. “The face in the mirror had no features. It was a radiant, honeyed flame.

“ ‘Leave this,’ the lion said, puffing out its chest and pointing with its chin towards the rag doll in the river. Her wedding dress had grown brown in the water. It looked as though it’d been steeped in tea.

“ ‘She’s no longer your concern, nor mine, nor ours,’ they said all at once, their wings rustling with fire.

“ ‘This is who you are,’ the man said, tapping his finger on the mirror.

“I looked again at the rag doll and then at the mirror. ‘Oh, if Yankl
could only see me like this,’ I thought. In response, the woman pronounced a word that sounded as though it were formed completely of vowels, a word I recalled never having heard before, but which I nevertheless recognized as my own name.”

“Can you transcribe it for us?” Dr. Freud asked.

“I’ll try.”

Taking a piece of paper and his pen from him, Ita curled her tongue against her upper lip — she had never been taught to write — and scratched out in a very childish hand the name by which she’d been addressed:
.

“Something like that, I think.”

“Hm,” Dr. Freud said.

“The man stroked his beard, the woman crossed her arms, the lion shook his head. ‘Child,’ he roared, ‘come along with us. You mustn’t resist.’

“ ‘Yankl is gone,’ the man said, and the child piped in,
, you’re in enough trouble as it is.’ But still I refused.”

“You refused, Ita? But why?”

“I may have spat in God’s face, Yankl, I may have thrown away the life our Father in Heaven had given me, but I was a bride, and a bride who was still a virgin. I
too
had my claims, and I wasn’t going to be denied!

“ ‘Oh dear, oh dear, here we go again,’ the lion roared unhappily.

“ ‘If you persist in this,
the woman warned, ‘the horde will soon descend.’

“ ‘The horde?’ I said.

“ ‘In the morning,’ the child told me, ‘you’ll hunger for evening. In the evening, you’ll pray for dawn.’

“This was disagreeable news indeed, but still, I kept my resolve. ‘Is there no place then,’ I asked, ‘where I may shelter in the meantime while waiting for Yankl to join me?’

“ ‘Each time we meet’ — the bearded man sighed — ‘you ask the right wrong questions.’

“ ‘We’ve met before?’

“ ‘Oh, many, many times.’

“ ‘Short lives and violent deaths seem to be your métier,’ the lion roared.

“ ‘We meet as though between the acts of a very long play,’ the bearded man said, and the woman added: ‘Although not so long usually in your case.’

“ ‘About this sheltering,’ I said.

“ ‘Oh,
don’t be foolish now.’

“ ‘Tell me!’ I insisted.

“ ‘As we are bound to the truth, we shall tell you.’ The man instructed me: ‘You may shelter in a stone, in an animal, or in another human being, though I promise you you’ll find no peace there. You laugh?’ he said to me. ‘You think this is amusing?’

“I looked again, knowing it was for the last time, at the body of that poor drowned girl, lying among the river rocks. ‘Poor Ita,’ I thought. ‘Well, this ended badly,’ I said.

“ ‘It
will
end badly,’ the bearded man corrected me. ‘While you continue to resist, things are far from over.’

“ ‘Bless me then, angel?’ I asked them shyly.

“ ‘Alas, poor
the woman said, ‘there isn’t time.’

“It chilled me to the bone to see the angelic being raise all eight of its eyes and gaze past my shoulder. I turned to look at what they were seeing.”

“And what were they seeing, Ita?” I said.

“Oh, Yankl, on the horizon, under a purple sky, moving as though in a dirty rain cloud towards the promontory upon which we all stood, was the horde.”

She stared into the space before her, as though witnessing it all again. “I’d never seen such a rude and murderous crew, certainly not in the previous world, with their dirty black wings and their sharp claws and the hideous insignias inked all over their reptilian skins.

“ ‘Are these angels as well?’ I asked.

“ ‘Of a sort,’ the man said.

“ ‘Demons,’ the woman elaborated.

“ ‘A subcategory,’ the child explained.

“ ‘Good-bye for now, darling
the lion roared. ‘If I were you and if you sincerely mean to resist …’