The Sonderberg Case (14 page)

Alika finally located the man, actually not such a rare bird: therapists and psychiatrists who use hypnosis are not difficult to find in New York.

A young athlete, suntanned and with a clear gaze, greeted Yedidyah and, to the latter’s surprise, requested that he take a seat facing his desk rather than recline on the mythical couch so valued by followers of Freud. Professor William Weiss seemed pleasant and likable.

Second surprise: “I know your name. Yes, I’ve read your reviews. Theater is somewhat of a hobby for me. I could have become an actor, but—like you, no doubt—I prefer to watch and listen. However, I like your approach to theater. You don’t come across as a burned-out actor or an unlucky playwright, but as a lover of the stage; someone who refuses to consider himself defeated and finds his own way of expressing his love of beauty, art, and artistic truth.”

They spoke about theater for a while until finally the professor said: “But I’m sure you didn’t come to see me in
order to discuss the latest production of the great and incomprehensible Jason Palinov. What brings you here this morning?”

“Memory,” Yedidyah replied.

“I see,” said the psychiatrist. “Are you having problems with it? Do you think you’re losing it. Is it playing tricks on you? You can’t remember where you left your pen, or your car keys? Afraid of Alzheimer’s, is that it? All intellectuals are afraid of it. But you, you’re still fairly young …”

“That’s not the problem,” Yedidyah said, embarrassed.

“What is it, then?”

Yedidyah explained his case to him. Repressed memories for which no clues remained. He couldn’t remember his early childhood. He could rack his memory, scour it, coax it: to no avail. It was wrapped in an opaque veil. In his very first memories he saw himself on a boat. He must have been about four years old. He was part of a group of children all about the same age. He was later told that this ship had brought him to America. He could only remember that he had become weak. He slept, and when he woke up he found himself in a family that had become his own.

“What language did you speak?”

“Yiddish.”

“Not English?”

“English, too. I don’t know how I managed, but I don’t think I ever learned it. It’s as though I’ve spoken it all my life. But this is not my reason for being here in your office, Doctor. I don’t know who I am, or where I come from. My
name was changed; I feel I’m someone else and therefore betraying the child I was and the man foreshadowed in that child. It’s as though I were living a lie, Doctor. That’s my problem or, if you prefer, my ailment. And I’m told that under hypnosis everything that’s hidden away might be revealed to me. Am I mistaken? Am I deluding myself? It seems to me you’re my last hope.”

Professor Weiss smiled and explained to his visitor that things were not so simple: hypnosis, he said, doesn’t necessarily have the same effect on all patients. For some, its effects are a long time coming, while for others they’re almost instantaneous. For obscure reasons, there are still others who resist it, remain distant, and then the therapist is simply powerless.

“But we can try,” he concluded.

“Right away?” Yedidyah asked, a bit frightened nevertheless.

“No. Next time.”

After some last-minute hesitations, Yedidyah made an appointment.

Luckily, Yedidyah did not resist hypnosis. He let himself be willingly and pleasantly guided by the therapist’s voice, which was at the same time neutral and controlling. It doesn’t feel like he’s sleeping, or even dozing, but rather like he’s dreaming. He sees himself in a pretty little city; there are small houses, gardens in bloom, many trees, many
birds under a gray and stormy sky. But the streets are empty. The houses, too. Everyone is hiding. Yet the little boy is not alone. A man and a woman are holding him by the hand as they go down into a dark basement. He’s shivering; he’s cold. He knows they love him, and he loves them, but he also knows they’ll abandon him. So he starts to cry. And the woman takes him in her arms and kisses him, while whispering in his ear, “Don’t cry, my darling baby, my beloved, you mustn’t cry; you’re a Jewish child and Jewish children have no right to cry. You must live, you must, you’re all we still have on this earth. Promise me you won’t cry, promise me you’ll live.”

“And then?” asks the therapist’s faraway voice.

“Then nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I want to cry. With all my heart I want to cry. But I don’t.”

“And the woman? You’re little and you’re in her arms …”

“Yes, in her arms, that’s it.”

“She’s your mother.”

“I’m in my mother’s arms.”

“And the man?”

“He, too, he takes me in his arms.”

“He’s your father.”

“Yes. I’m in my father’s arms.”

“And then what?”

“Then nothing.”

“And no one?”

“Yes. A boy. He reads books. When he reads, he doesn’t talk.”

“Who is it?”

“My brother.”

“His name?”

“Dovid.”

“Dovid?”

“Dovid’l. I love him. He plays with me. I make him laugh.”

“Who do you see?”

“People. In the street. In the courtyard. In a garden. But they’re nothing. It all amounts to nothing.”

“These people, do you know them?”

“Strangers. I don’t like them. They’re mean. Brutes. I don’t know them. I don’t want to know them. I want them to go away. I want them to let me go away. They’re there because my father isn’t there. Because my mother isn’t there. They scare me. Scare me so much that I ache. I ache all over. But I keep silent.”

“These people, what are they like? Tall? Short? Fat? Well dressed?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to see them. I see them without seeing them. My father left me because of them. My mother abandoned me because of them. I’m cold now that she’s no longer with me. I’m always cold.”

“These people don’t warm you up?”

“They’re nothing to me.”

“Do you sometimes see yourself as happy over there?”

“Yes. With Dad and Mom.”

“Do you sometimes laugh over there?”

“Now that my brother left me, I don’t laugh anymore. I see myself in the empty basement of an empty house, and the empty house is located in an empty city. I see myself there and I know that I’m empty, too.”

Yedidyah admits to Alika that this trip inside his memory distresses and disorients him.

“A name, recall a name.”

“Over there, I have no name. I’m too little. I’m not entitled to one. I’m a Jewish child. Jewish children have to rid themselves of their names so they can live.”

“The people in the basement, what do they call you?”

“When they come, they motion to me. I obey.”

“And you, what do you call them?”

“I never call them. They call me. To eat. To drink. To sleep.”

“Do they hit you sometimes? Do they punish you?”

“Yes. No. They’re abusive. Bad tempered. They never smile. I feel threatened. Threatened when they’re absent. And when I see them before me.”

“When you have an ache somewhere, what do they do so you’ll ache less?”

“Nothing.”

“Do they speak to you?”

“They yell and I hear nothing.”

“And when you’re sick?”

“I stay sick.”

“No physician has come to see you?”

“No one has come. Ever.”

“Are you often sick?”

“Yes, but I don’t say anything. My parents forbade me to talk when I’m not well. It’s no one’s business; that’s what they said to me.”

“So how do the mean people know?”

“They don’t know anything. They don’t love me. I’m a hindrance to them. They hate me. They resent me for being there, alive, in their house, in their life. The last time …”

“The last time what?”

“The last time I was sick it was like I was drunk. I saw things. Intruders. I saw my dad. Behind him, I saw my mom. They motioned to me not to say they were there. All of a sudden they disappeared. Slowly. First their legs disappeared in a cloud. Then their chests. Their necks. Their heads. Everything turned white. And as red as fire. Thick. Thick ash. I knew it was a dream. I was sinking. I started yelling, but no sound came out of my throat. I yelled louder. Louder and louder. I was yelling in silence. My lungs were bursting; I was reeling; I no longer knew where I was. Or who I was. I woke up later, very late. On the boat. There, too, I knew it was a dream, though I wasn’t sure that it belonged to me or concerned me. Perhaps I had simply changed dreams.”

Professor Weiss says something, then his voice falls silent.

Yedidyah tells him a story that he got from his aged grandfather. It was a few days after his parents had revealed to him the secret of his birth.

“Once upon a time there was a young Jewish boy who lost his father. Naturally this deeply affected him. He never stopped sobbing all day. Even at night he sometimes shed tears in his sleep; he would wake up drenched from head to foot. ‘What makes you grieve so much?’ his mother asked him on a day when he seemed particularly unhappy, so much so that he couldn’t concentrate on a difficult passage in the Talmud. ‘What hurts most,’ replied the boy, ‘is not being able to follow in my father’s footsteps. How can I hope to resemble him, for he left too soon for me to benefit from his teaching? How can I become the second after him?’ And his mother reassured him: ‘In that case, my child, tell yourself that it was written up there that you would not be the second but, in your own way, the first.’ And my grandfather added: ‘This little boy became the founder of a Hasidic dynasty.’”

“So what’s the moral of that story?” Professor Weiss asks.

“I have no idea,” replies Yedidyah.

“Nor do I. But it seems to me we can see it displays a definite dose of optimism. No doubt your grandfather wanted you to understand that you, too, in your own way, could become a kind of first.”

Yedidyah thinks for a moment.

“The other little boy had the luck of growing up with
his mother; I didn’t. In fact, I pointed this out to my grandfather.”

“And how did he react?”

“He found me a bit unfair because, he said, after all, I have parents who love me just as if their own blood flowed in my veins.”

“And you replied?”

“That there’s no comparison. That it isn’t easy to live a life that is partially mutilated. I’m convinced that if I could get my childhood back, I would feel better. That’s why I’m counting so much on you, Professor.”

Yedidyah breaks off. He takes a deep breath as if to free himself of a burden. Then he starts talking again. “In fact, I couldn’t help telling my grandfather that I’m convinced I’ll see my parents and my brother again. In the other world, the world of truth. And with a sad smile my grandfather asked me, ‘And what will you do with us, over there?’ I answered, ‘I’ll introduce you all to one another.’ Help me to stand fast, Professor. Help me to make headway in reviving my extinguished memories.”

Professor Weiss said he would do his best.

When he went out into the street, Yedidyah had a thought, as he sometimes did, for Werner Sonderberg: Is it possible that he, too, would have been happier, twenty years earlier, if he had been able to extirpate from his memory a grief that had colored his life?

TROUBLED AT THE TIME
by the vague feeling that his life or the meaning of his life had escaped him, Yedidyah was on the verge of despair. He came close to becoming a mystic. He was no longer himself. Restless, nervous, hypersensitive, constantly irritated. Unbearable. In doubt about himself and his ties to Alika. He suffered through long nights of insomnia and self-questioning: Since I’m not the man I thought I knew, who am I? Asceticism of silence and rejection of all desire that drove Alika crazy. He couldn’t understand his own ineptitude: How could he not have guessed the truth, or at least not partially suspected it? He was angry with himself. He had lived and grown up among strangers whom he called Father, Uncle, Grandfather. He loved them as though they shared the same past. And now, of course, his own children were perpetuating this lie by calling his parents Grandfather and Grandmother.

Alika tried in vain to reason with him.

“Think about what you owe this family that became ours, that took you in with limitless generosity, with unconditional
love, never denying you anything. Try to be grateful for our luck, our happiness. You could have ended up with heartless and distant people. We both know we’ve met unhappy adopted children. And also men and women brought up by their real parents and yet unhappy for a host of reasons that escape us.”

“That’s a good argument,” Yedidyah answered in a tense voice. “But you’re wrong if you think I’m mad at my ‘parents.’ I’m mad at myself. For not having been able to figure the truth out sooner.”

Unsettled, distraught, his soul shaken, Yedidyah kept searching stubbornly for the “tree of life and knowledge” on which he could have leaned while confronting the intoxication of the unexpected. But he was burdened by his thoughts as others are by their bodies. They caused him to become morose and bitter.

What would have become of him without the innocent gaze and sadness of his two children, who, being young, didn’t understand his mood swings?