by Susan Taubes
“What else?”
“Darling, you will need a lot of money to get out of this mess. Write a book that gets you a fifty-thousand-dollar advance and it’s simple. You’re as free as a bird. Tokyo, Lima, Istanbul, anywhere. Spend your life on an airplane or cruising. It’s obvious you have to travel.”
“You really think so? O.K. I’ll try.”
He’s shaking his head. “You don’t believe it. If you could, really believe that, my dear. Can you think fifty thousand dollars?”
Each time she tries to think fifty thousand dollars, her lover’s image lights up. “No, I really can’t. There are things I should attend to. Besides, I should be somewhere else.”
“Darling, you are somewhere else.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Baby, I’m already in you.”
“It’s not right.”
“You prefer another position?”
“What about your lovely wife and children?”
“They’re three thousand miles away,” he yawns, “and you’re right here. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. You can laugh. It doesn’t bother me. Go on, laugh like a witch. It arouses me. Can you tell me now you don’t like how I screw around in you?”
“That’s O.K. But why do you have to have such a pot belly? What do you have in there—quintuplets?”
“I’ll tell you why. When God made me a genius he said, ‘Johann Tobler, I have made you a genius and I am giving you a big pot belly so you shouldn’t be vain.’ There you have the answer.”
“How sweet. Is that what you tell every woman?”
“What do you think? You would like me to invent something special for you?”
• •
“Leaving me, darling?”
“I have to make a phone call.”
“You forgive me if I don’t get up...so tired. You know how to get to the party?”
HELP BUILD PARADISE, she reads on the poster on the bathroom door.
“Oh, that’s a project we tried some years ago,” Kate Dallas shouts from the shower. “Environment chambers; everybody create his own. We got fantastic donations and bought five hundred acres of land in Colorado. The idea was happy pleasure. None of the old puritan masochistic stuff. But as a concession to human weakness we had what we called an Id-Lib chamber with whips and boots and girlies, the old sick bit. And you know, they spent all their time there, so we closed up the place. Just in time, too. So now we’re working to change people.” She emerges smiling and monumental in a long Greek robe Sophie remembers from the days they played together in The Trojan Women.
“I hear you’ve been doing LSD research—”
“That’s right. Do you want to go on a trip?”
“Christ no. I want to get off.”
Kate is combing her long hair before the mirror.
“I could have been another Garbo,” she sighs, “if only I weren’t six feet one.”
“Couldn’t you still?”
“As a matter of fact, I had a call just this morning...But no, I’m involved in this new project which will revolutionize consciousness. What a pity you missed my lecture! Do you realize all of psychiatry will be over in another decade? Freudian psychoanalysis will be looked on as the strangest witchcraft. It will have about as much relevance as Babylonian astrology. But tell me, what’s this about your being on a trip?”
“Well, I was on my way out of this world. An accident. It felt so fantastic I was sure this was it. But instead everything turned funny. Here I am on another trip, back on the old merry-go-round with Ezra. I have to appear at a trial tomorrow—my dead grandmother will be there and Reb Smuel of Nyitra, my cousins who died at Auschwitz.”
“The place will be crawling with ectoplasmic Jews! So what else is new?”
“Kate, I can’t stand it. I’m afraid I won’t hold out. If God appears, I’ll scream at Him.”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know God can’t appear. He is still becoming. I happen to be, well, personally involved in His becoming...but that’s another story. How much time have we got?”
“I don’t know. I should be back there already.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“I was in a coffin.”
“Baloney! I went to your wake ten years ago and the next morning we had blueberry pancakes. Every time you get a little bit up-tight, you pull the Osiris bit. Atavism, sheer atavism. The eternal return. What a lot of crap. Entelechy, my dear...That’s the ticket. The purposive universe. The burgeoning processive, dynamic continuum. Alfred North Whitehead. The Teilhardian vision...”
“Ezra.”
“Ezra is a bad thought in the divine mind.”
“But why do I still have him on my back?”
“I threw him off mine. Oh, yes. Once he tried to make a pass at me. I picked him up, put him in an airplane spin and threw him across the room. He lifted his head from the floor and said, ‘The only thing for you darling is a very cerebral orang-utan.’”
“With me he was not so funny.”
“Listen, O Shulamite with your teeth chattering ‘like a flock of shorn sheep,’ Ezra is finished...The Jews are finished. Out of the past with you, down with the wailing wall. Yes, that’s it. We will demolish it brick by brick. Hot dog! You mustn’t tell anyone, but we’ve just started working with an extraordinary new substance. Actually, it’s a virus—attacks the duodenum of the Arkansas wood louse. But on humans—marvelous—it’s a forgetting drug. Memory, we discover, is stored in a glutenous protein substance—mucopolysaccharides—a cell glue. Fuzz collects around the neurons. Now, in studying brain waves it turns out that there is a best fit pattern in which a wave closely resembles the one where the original information is stored. The waves are whispering together.”
“So that’s what it is. The chorus of murmuring! Old Israelites in my cells.”
“Correct, and it’s time they shut up. We’re going to dissolve that old glue. One whiff and you’ve got a clean slate.”
“And there goes that beautiful moment ten years ago, and the taste of the kiss that killed. Tell me, does it blot out everything?”
“That’s the whole point, you’d start from the beginning. Don’t be afraid, we’ll take care of you. We’ve got marvelous laboratory facilities, trained staff. In six weeks, you’ll be fit to walk out on the street.”
“What about sex?”
“Under our program, the sexual drive in the pathological forms in which we have known it will disappear. There will be love and physical enjoyment, but no fixation—a sane and happy world. It horrifies you?”
“The vision is not exactly original.”
“Of course not. It’s as old as sin. We have finally found the way. But you have to be spiritually ready. We are taking only convinced members. Did I tell you we are founding a new Church? Only way you get anything done in this country...”
“God help us.”
“Admit it, you can’t live without those murmuring Israelites. ‘May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem!’”
“But of course, to part is painful, to part with an old rag, even a tumor. It’s part of human nature to love one’s tumor. But seriously, Kate, I’m not hanging on to the old psychology, ego hang-up, continuity bit, the whole business of being a person, it’s absurd. Of course I believe in science. Glue around the neurons. Sure. But a chemical solution is simply not interesting. It’s not respectable. Or am I hopelessly sentimental?”
“Sophie, you’re a nut. You better go to your trial. And remember if you need anything, we’ve got it.”
TWO-FIFTEEN. Due for routine psychiatric examination. All these stupid formalities. Nicer office than her father’s. Abstract paintings, wall-to-wall carpeting and Scandinavian glass—must produce different free associations. She
lies down on the couch. Just to show him she can do it. Not inhibited.
“What do you want me to talk about—Sex? Father? Mother? Bedwetting? Electra Complex? Penis Envy? Anything you want me to—just let’s get it over with quick because I’ve got a ticket.”
“Sophie love, dear child, my darling, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart—!”
It’s her father’s Hungarian colleague ——. His wife died recently. Suicide most probably. Father said should consider his marriage proposal: fine man, has humor, father’s best friend, loved her since she was born, flourishing practice, first-rate mind, little paranoia belongs to it. Something to consider. Age difference often a positive factor. Marriage great temptation at sixteen. Couldn’t at sixteen; dreaming of a dark man.
He stands in the middle of the room, his plump hands clasped; drops his head dolefully like a priest while he repeats: “Before you do anything you need at least seven years of analysis. Minimum five; absolute minimum.” His head tips to the other side, he waits. He pulls his chair closer. So different from her father. Bright blue, popping, bloodshot eyes; delicate, moist, pink skin; speaks excitedly. Hoarse whisper with an undertone of choked laughter, choked terror, implores her to reconsider before she makes a life decision.
Fatman: not the heavy, trapped kind, entombed in a motionless stupor or twisting uncomfortable in his fat. No, the opposite; bubbling, volatile, excitement puffs out his face, swells flesh on his fingers. Bursting out of the skin. Pink from continual state of explosion.
He speaks to her in Hungarian, she answers in English. His use of diminutives, the first-person possessive suffix, it works on her—my dear, my little Sophie, she hears the nouns wrapped up in the “my” ending.
Can I love this man? He is imploring her with all his chins not to throw her life away. She dare not make any decision before she’s had seven years of therapy. She paces impatiently. Nothing can sway her from her purpose. He must understand. She must settle things. Divorce. Find school for the children. Check shipment from Paris. Five articles due. Contract for her new book.
“But what about your life? Your life!” he sings. She has made her decision. It’s clear she could love him. Sees some part of her lover in him.
“I must repeat my mother’s life,” she tells him firmly.
“You can do anything you want after your analysis, sweetheart,” he pursues, “go on the stage, study metaphysics; you can have all the affairs you want with cavalry officers, Olympic skiers, artists; you can be an aviator, a femme fatale, or marry and have ten children; anything, dearest, that makes you happy, but not before—” He is beseeching, hands clasped on his knees, embracing her in a cascade of possessive endings: not to make any final decisions, to wait—not to rush headlong—
“I must. I must.”
“What, my sweet, tell me what you must. I want only your happiness.”
“I must cross the Atlantic on the first plane. Visit the volcano. Must take the ferry boat down the Danube from Belgrade to Silistra and up the Volga from Astrakhan to Knibyshev. Explore the Galapagos Islands, the Amazon. By helicopter. I must travel all over the world. I can’t begin to tell you about all the journeys ahead of me. To Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, Prague, Lima, Tokyo, Moscow. Someone I love is waiting for me in every city and places not marked on the map. Along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The road to Delphi to consult the oracle. Down to Piraeus from the Agora. Must make a long sea voyage to Knossos; track down the minotaur in the labyrinth.”
He listens wide-eyed, with a stricken look, mouth hanging open, beautifully imbecilic.
“I have a travel grant,” she continues, suddenly afraid he knows everything. Sees paper with her father’s handwriting on his desk. Crazy fatman. Padded walls. Must get out. “They’re paying all my expenses; two-week Mediterranean cruise; may get a role in super Franco-Italian production on the island of Naxos. Will read all the psychoanalytic literature on the subject for my part. What does Freud say about the myth of the minotaur?”
He tells her in tears and with wild gesticulations the things that went on in her house in Budapest between her father and mother, the terrible, horrible, outrageous things. She feels along the quilted padding of the wall for the door. Knows all about that. Not a child. Knows what she’s doing.
“Must repeat my mother’s life,” she insists gravely. “No other alternative. The only true atonement. Follow in her footsteps—wherever it leads—nothing can stop me.”
“But it’s not at all the same, what you are doing, terribly, terribly mistaken,” he sobs. So winningly emotional. Has even a touch of Ezra. She blushes, suddenly ashamed; possibility all this is being televised. “Not at all the same situation, totally different from your mother—no similarity, terribly deceived my poor child.”
She refuses to discuss it with him. None of his business, her life. Will not be deterred by consideration of family, doesn’t care what consequences to them herself, once in her life will obey heart’s desire, be her true self. She laughs majestically in the doorway. Takes a bunch of peacock feathers from a vase and throws one at him graciously...
WAKING up in bed on a Wednesday morning, actually closer to noon, Sophie Blind lay staring dumbly at her familiar room. Ivan’s old raincoat still tacked on the window frame, and all around her reminders of lost joys, planted everywhere like Easter eggs, hatch vainly. The pains of waking are unmistakable. In dreams there is not this sense of idleness, staring at your hands surrounded by mute objects. In dreams something must always happen; a bird appears on the window sill...
For a little while longer she tried to understand what induced her to abandon a more exciting, important pursuit for just lying in bed in this room, till she realized it was not a considered choice. She blundered into awakening. If she is still baffled, and even while getting on her feet with relative ease, struggles to recall by what tremendous effort she flung herself or was cast out of sleep, if this Wednesday morning seems so odd in its banality and part of her mind continues to dive for some deep reason it’s because in the dreamer’s world it had to make sense. Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living—a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end.
Books were better than dreams or life. A book ended not like life, abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period. Between life and dream there was not much difference really, however the two wrangled, struggled, played tricks on each other. A book was something really different. To begin with, you know where you are: you’re in a book, and whether the setting is Paris or New York or the moon or not specified at all, you know you’re in a book. Perhaps you’re on a plane, perhaps you’re in a village in the Balkans reading a book in a hotel room, reading or writing, in someone else’s room, or your own kitchen when the children are asleep. You can be dreaming and not know it. You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it. But a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake. The question does not pose itself. Writing a book appealed to Sophie on all these grounds. In a book she knew where she was. Because, however baffling and blundering and ambiguous, a book was a book.
TWO
A FEW YEARS before the outbreak of the First World War, the son of the chief rabbi of Budapest and the grandson of the famed Rabbi Simon of Nyitra chose as his bride a woman of dubious background and gifts. Rosa Ripper, a brewer’s daughter (in student circles called the Rosa Luxemburg of Budapest), was a communist agitator with degrees in mathematics and medicine, a disciple of Freud and beautiful besides. Rudolf Landsmann met Rosa at the Galilei Club, the gathering place of students, socia
lists, avant-garde artists and intellectuals, which they both attended regularly. Little is known of the background of the brewer and his wife. Jews of a sort, for generations outside the Jewish community, assimilated, intermarried, with relations in Odessa and Constantinople—a case could be made for Khazar origins. In the eyes of the Landsmann family, they were riffraff. In 1912 Rudolf joined the psychoanalytic movement. At the medical school where he was studying brain histology, Freud’s theory was jokingly spoken of as the “technique grown-up men use to talk to juvenile girls about dirty things.”
Around this time a Transylvanian count who could trace his ancestry to the conquest sought in vain the favor of the same Jewish brewer’s younger daughter, Kamilla. The noble family ruined, bankrupt, mostly drunkards, Count Csaba-Csaba went to Budapest to study law so that he might raise his kin from poverty. No longer a youth, he occasionally attended the Galilei Club in an effort to catch up with the times. Futurism, Symbolism, Marxism, Freud, Esperanto—he lacked enthusiasm for these things. But from the day the blond, almond-eyed sister of Rudolf Landsmann’s fiancée came to the Galilei Club, the count’s attendance became regular. Kamilla, who began to accompany her sister to the club at the age of fourteen, mostly to escape from the house, was not interested in these issues either. After two years of mute adoration on the count’s part, they left the meeting and walked along the corso in the moonlight.
Count Csaba-Csaba did not know that such women still existed. A true goddess, who could inspire a man to adore without permitting him to rape. Not the words in which the count expressed his wonder, infatuation, his feelings, his ideal, he had poetic phrases at his disposal; part of the national tradition. The times were much too out of joint to remark the fact that his dream found its incarnation in a Jewish brewer’s daughter.
War broke out in 1914. The following year Rudolf Landsmann, army doctor in his emperor’s service, received the crushing letter from his fiancée while he was at a military hospital in Serbia: She had decided to marry Franz Gerechter, one of the communist leaders; the revolution was imminent; the cause came first; their engagement was broken. On a week’s leave in Budapest that Christmas, Rudolf, still heartbroken, went back to the Ripper house. Rosa was already married to Franz Gerechter and Rudolf’s return visit to the house, by his own account, was purely sentimental. “It had become a habit,” he said; for ten years the Ripper house had been his second home. He was received by the almond-eyed little sister, now almost sixteen, whom he had often held in his lap and helped with her Latin lessons, and promptly became engaged to her.