A Curable Romantic (92 page)

As for Ita — or for the woman the angels insisted was Ita — I’d encounter her periodically, limping through the streets in her white medical smock, and the odd happiness I’d felt at seeing her again, at discovering that she was still alive, never failed to fill me with a blushing sense of confusion.

The angels brought her up continually. Indeed, no conversation could proceed between us, it seemed, without her being mentioned at least once. More often, she formed the whole of our conversation. I refused to demonstrate any interest in her person before the two of them, but this didn’t stop them. They’d pretend to forget that I could hear them and discuss some secret something or other in front of me until my curiosity was piqued. Perhaps it was all part of the byzantine protocol of the Heavenly Court for which they worked. Perhaps a mortal must ask for information before the Angelics may give it to him. I had no idea. And at times, I was too heartsick to even wonder about it.

“He’s not even listening to us,” one of them might say.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, are you even listening to us?”
waved his hand before my eyes.

“She’s moved into a new apartment — that’s what we’re trying to tell you.”

“It’s
outside
the ghetto.”

“Yes, that’s the amazing thing!”

“It’s directly across from where you stay when you’re smuggling.”

“Could you please keep your voices down!”

“In fact, looking through your window, you can see directly into hers.”

THE LESS SAID
about my smuggling, the better. There was nothing heroic about it. Thanks to my fluency in German, I’d been impressed into the underground and given a key to an empty apartment. Inside the apartment was a wardrobe, and inside of the wardrobe was the uniform
of a German captain. (The underground employed a small cabinet of tailors, and one of these, a diminutive fellow with a hump on his back, had paid me a clandestine visit two or three weeks previous.) Whenever I put it on, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The transformation was too dispiriting. At my age and with the lowish rank my handlers had assigned to me, no one would mistake me for anything but a lifelong military man who hadn’t had the verve to succeed. Invisible to the German soldiers I encountered, I was nevertheless terrifying to the Poles and the Jews who crossed my path. Though a gun came with the uniform, I didn’t have the nerve to inquire if it was loaded. I hoped not. Having it made me nervous.

Though Chłodna Street was in the Aryan Quarter, it linked the large ghetto with the smaller one, and we were all forced, at various times, to cross it. Doing so filled me with terror. How ludicrous to suppose I wouldn’t be unmasked here and shot! Despite my gleaming leather boots and my oiled revolver, despite my clean-shaven cheeks stinging against the morning air, despite the sneer I wore, for good measure, between those cheeks, what was I but an overdressed Jew? (And why shouldn’t I believe what they had always told us about ourselves, that our smell was different from theirs, that the shape of our eyes gave us away, that our nose, our gait, the very curve of our spine marked us from a hundred meters away?) There was always a throng gathered at the Chłodna crossing, men and women stamping and fretting on both sides of the street, preoccupied with the business of saving their lives. At the guard’s shrill whistle, it was all I could do not to throw up my hands and surrender. Though my presence had provoked the whistling, it wasn’t to stop me, I realized, but to permit me, a German captain, to cross.

We saluted each other, this guard and I, traffic grinding to a halt on either side of me. I stepped into the street, the swarm of nervous Jews keeping a respectful distance behind me.

Only in the Polish Quarter did the dread drop from my shoulders. Here, children chased one another in parks, and lovers were quarreling. I found a bench, hidden in a grove of trees, where I vomited and wept. Eventually, I made my way to the address I’d been asked to memorize. And there, I’d sit in the back room until I heard another key turning
in the front door and a bag falling on the parlor table, followed by a brisk rapping, in code. After that, the door was shut and the lock locked. Twenty minutes later, I’d enter the parlor and conceal whatever contraband had been left there — food, guns, messages, bullets, whatever — in the thousand pockets sewn secretly into my uniform by my humpbacked tailor.

In truth, I would never have searched for Ita myself, nor even made inquiries into her whereabouts. Nothing would have been more frightening to a Jewish woman living a double life in the Polish Quarter than having a German officer asking after her. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to. The angels were correct: the woman whom they endeavored to convince me was Ita (the name would have meant nothing to her, I suppose) did in fact keep an apartment directly across from the one the underground had assigned me; and it was also true, as the angels had additionally claimed, that because my rooms were a story higher than hers, I could see into her windows from my own, and never more clearly than at dusk.

How to justify this Peeping Tomfoolery? If I believed that
and
were little more than feverish projections appearing in the Magic Lantern of my brain, manifesting from a combination of hunger, anxiety, and despair, it made no sense to credit their preposterous claims. Whoever she was, I was convinced this young doctor was not Ita, and yet, for reasons I can’t explain, it was impossible to repress the thrill I experienced each time I caught sight of her through the twin veils of our windows, undoing her coat or removing her hat, tossing it onto a table and letting her hair drop about her shoulders.

She was a not unattractive woman, and each time she turned her back on me in order to light her stove, for instance, I couldn’t help admiring her backside and her shapely flanks.

Unable to stop myself, I reached for the binoculars with which, along with the gun and the whistle, and half a dozen other wartime accoutrements, my uniform came equipped, and unclasped them from their holster.

One evening, I watched as she dragged a big brass tub into the middle of her kitchen and began filling it with water heated on the stove. I
resolved to put an end to this ocular trespass and had even begun drawing the curtains when she lifted both her arms to unbutton the top of her dress. Instead, I adjusted the focus on my binoculars as she lowered her arms and reached behind herself for the lower buttons. Letting the garment fall to the floor, she stepped out of it before picking it up with her bare foot and placing it on a chair. Reaching back again with both arms, she unhooked her brassiere, and her two small breasts fell from their binding. With a little skip, she stepped out of her underpants, and though I cautioned myself to turn away, to look away, instead, I admired the dark triangle of her sex as she lifted first one leg and then the next over the rim of the tub.

A low moan escaped from my mouth, and I chided myself. Hadn’t I been warned against making noise of any kind. The walls were thin, and this apartment was assumed by the residents of the building to be empty. But even worse: wasn’t this exactly the way I’d encountered Ita that first time in Vienna, attending Dr. Herzl’s play at the Carl, dressed in the costume of another man, gazing at her through a lorgnette?

Had nothing in my life changed or progressed since that night? I threw down the field glasses, and as I did, I found myself thinking of my father, his saturnine face appearing in my mind’s eye. When I was young enough that it mattered, he’d broken something deep within me. Thanks to that brokenness, I’d lurched through my life with a crooked gait, listing to the side, never quite arriving where I intended, and the more I attempted to straighten myself, the crookeder I became. I was an old man now, and my tormentor was long dead, but, as with any ancient hurt, the wound ached from time to time.

Why had he forced Ita, this eternal bride, onto me? Were we truly fated to each other? Would we just keep chasing each other through the millennia, as we had since the giving of the Torah, if Dr. Freud’s chart was to be believed? I’d broken all my promises to her, and in return she’d destroyed everything I loved, all for the sake of some selfish reward. Though neither
nor
would reveal to me the terms of the bargain she’d made with them, it wasn’t egoism that made me suspect it had to do with me. When had Ita ever thought of anything
but
her all-consuming passion for my person? One had only to watch
and
like shadchens hoping to marry off two mamzers, to understand what she was up to: at last, after chasing each other through various worlds and incarnations, we’d reunite and consummate our love. That our earthly reunion should occur under the inhuman conditions of the ghetto, I chalked up to Heaven’s great irony. When, after all, had God ever kept His word beyond the strict measure of the Law? If a reunion with me was indeed the favor she’d requested of the Celestial Courts, Heaven, I felt certain, would see to it that our life together was as short and painful as possible.