A Curable Romantic (44 page)

“But you yourself tried to convince me doing so was morally reasonable.”

“See: reason one.”

“Surely you’re jesting!”

“No, Dr. Sammelsohn, I assure you I am not. I can’t lie to you: this case could make my name, and I’m not going to rush through it as I did, damn it, with that damned cocaine!”

(As a young medical man, having pioneered the research into cocaine as an ophthalmological anesthetic, Dr. Freud left off from his work in order to visit his then fiancée, Martha Bernays. While he was gone, his friend Carl Koller perfected the practical application, work for which he was subsequently nominated for a Nobel Prize.)

I didn’t know what to say. With both hands, I pulled back my hair. My limbs felt light, my head woozy. I looked at Dr. Freud’s chart, spread out across the two tabletops, the new additions glinting under the gaslights as the fresh ink dried. I peered out the café window. It was past midnight. We’d been talking for hours. A fierce snowstorm had blown in.

“But this is preposterous!” I said.

“What exactly is preposterous?” Dr. Freud returned.

“That you should put establishing your name before the well-being of either of your patients! I don’t know what to say, but … I won’t stand for it. Good night, sir!” I tramped out of the café, a dramatic exit whose drama was spoiled by the fact that, dizzy with the new information I’d been absorbing, I’d left my coat behind. Rolling up his chart, binding it with a pale blue ribbon, Dr. Freud looked up from this task when I reentered the café. “I’ve forgotten my coat,” I explained. He squinted in incomprehension, apparently not having heard me. “I’ve forgotten my coat,” I said, a bit more forcefully this time.

“Oh, oh, yes,” he said. “Well, mustn’t go out without that. Not in this weather.”

“Good night, then,” I said, grabbing the garment.

“Good night, Doktor.”

“We’ll speak,” I said, attempting a note of reconciliation.

I walked out into the night. My head was on fire. Had I really been chasing Ita through the world for thousands of years? And if I had, what did I intend to do about it now? My first impulse was to flee the city. Perhaps Dr. Freud was right. If a simple love on a small scale can scald a person beyond recognition, what of a love that stretches through millennia,
binding the living and the dead, a love so ruthless it cares neither how many hostages it takes nor how many corpses lie in its wake? I certainly wasn’t prepared for such a love; and besides, as I kept reminding myself, Ita was dead. What kind of lover would a dead woman make, to say nothing of a wife? What sort of home might we build together? What sort of children did I imagine she would give me? No, a future with Ita was nothing but a silly daydream. The most I could hope for was a night or two of passion. Although what was wrong with that? With the door of Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital room secured and locked, the three of us might come to an understanding and finally know the vivifying pleasure of physical love. Indeed, as Dr. Freud himself had pointed out — before he countered his own reasoning — the body in question was and was not Fräulein Eckstein’s. And though I’d come to realize that it wasn’t Fräulein Eckstein I’d fallen in love with, but rather Ita, sheltering inside her, I wasn’t, in all honesty, indifferent to the beauty of Fräulein Eckstein’s body, even in its present state. And mightn’t the experience be beneficial for her, or even especially for her, if, as a result, Ita released her from her grasp? Still, I wasn’t convinced, even in our enlightened age, that an encounter of this sort wouldn’t adversely affect her chances for a decent marriage. Still, what was the alternative — contacting Rabbi Chajes at the Seitenstettengasse Shul and asking him to round up eight Jews besides ourselves (seven if Dr. Freud consented to join us) to serve as participants in an exorcism? Hadn’t I left all that behind? The superstition, the guileless piety, the seeing of the Divine Hand beneath every crack in the sidewalk! It was 1895, after all, the modern age! If, as a child, I’d known enough to reject my parents’ beliefs as foolish, was I really to adopt them now as a grown man? And even if I ran to Rabbi Chajes’s and asked for his help, I knew he’d laugh me out of his office. Here, in the West, even the religious scoff at the wonders we, in the East, take for granted!

And yet I’d never felt like this before. The experience was absolutely new to me, and it filled me with an enormous sense of contentment and glee: I was loved.
I was loved!
I, Ya’akov Yosef Sammelsohn, was loved with a love spanning aeons and generations! And thanks to the young science of psychoanalysis, for the first time in all my various lives, I understood something about the long history Ita and I shared and could
now make an informed decision regarding it. How, under such circumstances, could I let such a love slip through my fingers?

I’d intended to return home, to sleep perhaps for an hour before trudging into the clinic, but instead I found myself walking all night, sipping from the bottle of brandy I’d taken, without Dr. Freud’s noticing, from the Guglhupf. It was nearly dawn, however, and I was lost. None of the streets were familiar to me, the district completely unknown. And yet, when I raised my head — mirabile visu! — I saw that I’d somehow arrived at the Sanatorium Loew, its long marble edifice glinting in the new morning light. It looked different from the way I remembered it. I’d seen it only in the dead of night, when the gas lamps made everything dilapidated and sad. In the freshly minted light of a sparkling winter day, the building seemed bright, even iridescent.

Go home, run home, go! No good will come of this! I cautioned myself as I opened the gate. Go home! I admonished myself, and I ignored these admonitions as I made my way through the foyer into the mezzanine and down the hallway to Fräulein Eckstein’s door, knocking upon it as softly as I could.

“Ita?” I stuck my head into her room provisionally. “Darling, are you here? Are you awake? Can you rouse yourself, my dear?”

The body in the bed began to stir. Lifting her head from the pillows, she sat up and looked at me. However, it was not Ita, but Fräulein Eckstein who greeted me.

“Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn?” she said. “Is that you? Why, you look a mess!”

(My clothes were damp and my hair wet from my long night’s walk. Also, thanks to the brandy, I’m certain I had the disreputable look of a man who’d been drinking all night. Which is exactly what I was.)

“Have you come to rescue me?” She laughed gaily. “Or abscond with me? I hope so. Because I must tell you, Dr. Sammelsohn, I’m feeling ever so much better.”

“Would you like that, Fräulein? If we ran away together?”

“Why is it, Dr. Sammelsohn,” she said to me, “that you and I have not fallen in love with each other?”

“Why not indeed, Fräulein?”

She took my hand. “Wouldn’t we have made a suitable pair?”

Although her tone was flirtatious, she seemed to have meant her question earnestly. Arrested by her flirtatiousness, I looked into her lovely face. Before I could answer her, however, before I could say anything at all, in fact, the expression of hopeful curiosity vanished from it. It was as though someone had pulled her away from a window, a window at which, in the next moment, the face of her captor appeared.

“Yankl?” Ita said, equally pleased and surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?” She closed the neck of her gown demurely. “And so early?”

“Do you mind if I sit down, Ita?”

“Oh, my hair must be a fright.” With both hands, she touched her hair, but made no effort to comb or untangle it. I drew my chair near to her bedside.

“No, you look lovely.”

“Flatterer!”

“But you
do
.”

She gave me a frank look. “You’ve been speaking with Dr. Freud, haven’t you?”

“I have indeed.”

“And how much has he told you?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Enough.”

“And now? What do you intend?”

At that moment, a white-hatted nurse stuck her head into the room. “Ah, I see you’re awake,” the nurse said.

“I am,” Ita answered, as sweetly as Fräulein Eckstein might.

“Are you hungry?”

“Oh, simply ravenous!”

She carried in the tray. “Good morning, Doctor,” she said to me, eying my wet hair and my miserable-looking clothes. “Is everything all right with you, sir?”

“Nurse.” I nodded in greeting. “Thank you. Yes, I’m fine.”

She placed the tray near Fräulein Eckstein’s bed. Laid out upon it were
a soft-boiled egg in an alabaster cup, pats of butter, a hard roll, jam, coffee, and a small glass of prune juice.

“We have to keep up our strength,” she cautioned.

“We certainly do,” Ita sang out.

She tucked in the corners of Fräulein Eckstein’s bed before leaving us to ourselves again.

“You know, she’s right,” Ita said to me when she’d gone. “If I don’t feed and care for this old body, giving it the proper nourishment, doing my twenty minutes of calisthenics and walking every day, poor Eckstein might waste away, and then where would I be?”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

Ita’s face hardened; she stopped chewing her egg; she held up the little spoon, making her point. “Let me tell you something, Yankl,” she said. “I’m not going back. I’m never going back, not into a disgusting animal nor into a stone! You’ve never experienced coldness until you’ve lived as a stone, to say nothing of
slowness!
Oh, the tedium!”

I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re quite a charming woman.”

“Stop it!”

“But you know that, don’t you?”

“Well, if I didn’t, you’ve been telling me it for thousands of years.”

“Have I?”

“According to Dr. Freud.”

“Well, I mean it this time.”

“As you have all the other times,” she said.

“And yet?”

“You’ve never acted upon those feelings.”

She was right. She was right. Stung, I stood and paced the room. I turned my back upon her and stared out the window, though I could still feel her eyes upon me, watching my every move. “Ita,” I said, “you know as well as I the dead have no claims upon the living.”

Though I couldn’t see it, I sensed her gesture: a small victorious shrug. “I’m not interested in laws,” she said, “neither God’s nor man’s.”

I watched through the window as sheaths of ice dropped from the branches of a tree and fell silently into the snow.

“Don’t you imagine you’ll be punished severely?”

“I’ll deal with that when I have to.”

I turned and, without success, tried to read her face. “You have no intention of keeping your bargain, do you?”

“My bargain?”

“Of surrendering Fräulein Eckstein if your demands are met.”

“No.” She laughed. “Why should I?”

“You really are wicked, aren’t you?”

“Oh, you have no idea, Yankl. You should see the despair that greets me every time I die. Poor
. How he shakes his head over me, always hoping for even the slightest bit of moral improvement, but I always disappoint him. He has the patience of a saint, though I suppose an angel would.”

I couldn’t help smiling.

“I’m glad I amuse you,” she said.

I had to admit it: she looked stunning in her bed, radiant, as only an invalid can, with fevers, her hair a wild mess about her shoulders.

“Why do I run from you?” I said. “Tell me that, Ita. Why have I run from you through all these many lives?”

Though the entire room separated us, we were now looking directly into each other’s eyes. I could feel the winter’s chill through the window panes on my back.

“Yankl,” she said, naughtily. “Come here, my darling, and I’ll show you why.”

“No, Ita,” I said, dropping my gaze and losing my nerve.

I looked out the window again, and when next I turned to her, I was alarmed to see that she had unbuttoned Fräulein Eckstein’s gown and unlaced her chemise and pulled both garments from her shoulders. With both hands, she lifted the Fräulein’s small breasts and held them up to me. At the sight of her flesh, mine began to yearn for hers, tingling, as though under the electric pulse of a faradic brush. She smiled a small smile of barely concealed triumph.

“Let me lock the door,” I heard myself saying, and soon, my hands were fumbling with the key. I crossed the room and sat next to her. The bed was high, and I am short, and so I sat on the edge like a child, my feet not quite reaching the floor. I kissed her, my chest constricting in a
wild spasm. Indeed, I could barely breathe. Below my cravat and through the fabric of my shirt, beneath the wings of my vest and under the lapels of my suit, I could feel Fräulein Eckstein’s soft breasts hardening, as my lips grazed hers.

“You don’t know how long you’ve been waiting for this, Yankl, but I do.”

“Ita.” I gulped for breath.

She placed a hand tenderly on my cheek. “Darling, let’s not speak.”

“But I love you,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

She leaned back and looked at me as though I’d suddenly gone mad.

“I mean it,” I told her. “I love you. Is that so very strange?” I moved in to kiss her again, but she pushed me away, both of her hands flat against my chest.

“And you expect me to believe that?”