Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  A few months later, back at the Serbian front, Rudolf received a letter from his sister Lea in which she mentioned among other gossip items that she saw Kamilla Ripper walking arm in arm with Count Csaba-Csaba in the moonlight on the Fisher’s Bastion. Rudolf wrote Kamilla that their engagement was broken and not to bother to write to him again. He was through with the Ripper girls. In his sister’s next letter he learned of Kamilla’s marriage to the count.

  Perhaps it was all for the best. Rudolf distinguished himself as a military doctor: he succeeded in enforcing anti-epidemic measures among backward peasants where others had failed. In particular, Moslem women and nuns resisted delousing, but the young doctor attended to these matters personally and with success. He became a favorite of the Trappist monks, who were eager to recommend him for the chair in psychiatry at the Royal Hungarian Academy in Budapest. He was further promised a post as director of a newly founded psychiatric institute in Sarajevo, assuming that the Dynasty won the war. Both positions required celibacy and conversion to the Catholic faith. Did Rudolf seriously consider?

  The Dynasty did not win. The defeated emperor’s troops were caught in the Serbian uprising. Somehow Rudolf Landsmann found his way back to Budapest. There he found chaos. His four years’ army pay which he had sent home to his parents to save was worth the price of a shirt.

  A succession of short-lived revolutionary regimes was terminated by a three-year period of counterrevolutionary terror. Rosa Ripper, who had been one of the leading members of the communist Bela Kun regime, escaped execution by fleeing from the capital barefoot in a nightgown and jumping on a moving train. The count and his Jewish wife had survived the communist regime with no greater incident than Rosa’s demanding that sister Kamilla hand over to her all her clothes and linen for the poor. Some years later under the counterrevolutionary regime when the police who knocked on her door one dark night asked why she attended the Galilei Club, Kamilla knew how to lower her eyes and say, “To catch a husband,” with just a trace of a lisp that would convince the gendarme of any party. “And did you?” the gendarme asked. Kamilla stuck her index finger in her mouth and nodded with a silent giggle. Which husband? It wasn’t clear from Kamilla’s account. When this incident took place she was Rudolf Landsmann’s wife. For in the course of these political upheavals Countess Csaba-Csaba and Rudolf Landsmann seemed to have met—one of those incredible chance encounters, as Kamilla told the story later—met in front of a small corner tabac; she was just about to enter the store as he came out. They discovered it was true love after all. Kamilla’s marriage to the count was annulled—a simple procedure, as Rudolf told the story later: The count, a gentleman to the last and moreover a lawyer, produced a false birth certificate for Kamilla which made her a minor at the time she married. Neither Rudolf nor Kamilla remembered the year of their wedding forty years later. A passport issued to Mrs. Rudolf Landsmann for travel to Austria for purposes of health, and bearing Kamilla’s picture, dated the marriage to before March, 1921.

  In Budapest the first years of the twenties witnessed, besides the continuation of postwar chaos, the Treaty of Trianon and the setting up of a reactionary state. During the winter of 1921 a series of mass executions took place. Hundreds of politically undesirable citizens—communists, Marxists, socialists, leftists of all varieties—were sent sprawling in the grass, snow, then mud of the famous Bloodmeadow where, not so long before, politically undesirable citizens of another hue had been disposed of similarly. More, it seems, were on the list than were effectively eliminated. Rudolf Landsmann, for one, received an order to appear before government authorities. When he did he noticed some familiar faces among small crowds in the waiting room. The government official informed him that they had records of his former membership in the Galilei Club, the hotbed of revolutionaries. Admitting this, Rudolf Landsmann pleaded that he was never a member of the communist party, or a Marxist for that matter, and that he had faithfully served his country in the war as an officer of the royal Imperial Army. After a brief interrogation as regarded his occupation, marital status, present employment, he was laconically dismissed. Some fifty of the unknown number called to report that morning were shot the same afternoon.

  Rudolf Landsmann at the time believed the new government spared his life because they needed doctors. Another explanation came to light some years later when he learned that in fact he had been on another blacklist—that of the communist party, which had slated him to be shot in the previous year, 1920. The list comprised former members of the Galilei Club who, being liberal but not Marxist, were the first to be eliminated if order was to be established. This list had been submitted to a high communist official who had frequented the Galilei Club in his student days, and had lain in his desk drawer awaiting his signature. The high official, as it turned out, did not get around to signing this piece of paper. Nobody was pressing for the signature and executions were being conducted in such mass and haste that a half a dozen missing corpses easily went unnoticed. The list that included Rudolf’s name remained in the high official’s drawer; perhaps he was simply putting it off for tomorrow or the next day, or telling himself that he was only putting it off; he had enjoyed some pleasant evenings at the Galilei Club with Rudolf Landsmann; they had played soccer together, in fact they had been friends; still, he was a high official in the new communist regime. The story told to Rudolf years later in Vienna by the former high official was that he couldn’t do it; the day he received the slip he folded it with no intention of ever signing it, and laid it in his desk drawer. There it remained even after the regime fell and he fled to Vienna; there the police of the new government found it in 1921. It was fortunate for Rudolf Landsmann that he had been on the blacklist of the communist party in 1920. As a former member of the Galilei Club, he was politically undesirable; but the fact that the communists had wanted to get rid of him made the authorities reconsider. And besides, there was a shortage of doctors. At the time he was called in for questioning, Rudolf Landsmann worked at two hospitals during the day besides six hours every night in the clinic. How did he do it? He had to. It was the time of the Great Depression. The brewer went bankrupt and moved to a sorry little flat which he and his wife now shared with his daughter Kamilla and her husband who paid the rent. Rudolf was lucky to have three jobs.

  In the depression of 1922 he lost two of his jobs. His father was ill, his mother complained, his father-in-law went insane, Hermann, the one brother he loved, emigrated to Canada, his marriage wasn’t working out. One morning in 1922 he went to the American consulate and signed up for a visa. And having nothing else to do till noon, he went to seven other consulates and applied for visas to Egypt, Australia, Palestine, Canada, Argentina, Honduras, and Tanganyika.

  When, four weeks later, he received a letter from the U.S. consulate informing him that he had been granted an immigration visa, valid for two months from the day of issue, everything was up in the air. He had a half dozen private patients, he was being considered for a part-time post at the city insane asylum, he was completing a book which he believed would win him recognition, and his wife seemed more reasonable after a fortnight’s stay with her sister. Furthermore, she informed him that she was pregnant. It was not the moment to pick up and go—and under the circumstances, with everything up in the air, two months was simply not enough time to make such an important decision. The day he applied for a visa to America he thought of leaving everything behind. He intended to go alone. He didn’t imagine going with a wife, let alone a pregnant wife. He put the letter from the consulate in a drawer and continued working on his book, which as he anticipated won him immediate recognition. Soon he moved to an apartment where he could have his own office and in another two years he had a ten-room apartment in one of the finest parts of Pest a few streets from the Parliament.

  •

  To the Landsmann family, Rudolf’s marriage to one of the “Ripper girls” (and the lesser, at that), a girl who was a divorcée at the time
of the marriage, who they suspected was schmatte; this was a great disappointment. The years following the end of the war brought many disappointments to the family; and worse than disappointment, shame and grief brought on by a son who stole money and ran away, another who turned into a good-for-nothing (a football player), a third who killed himself. The shame and grief over these and other sons and daughters known to live unhappy, insufficient lives was acknowledged in silence. There was no helping the death of a son, or the unhappiness of a daughter married to an orthodox rabbi with two children. Rudolf’s marriage, however, they could not accept. This misfortune was unnecessary. He was not happy; his wife made difficulties for him and she did not give him a child.

  Kamilla, taking all rumors into account, seems to have divided her time between consulting the best practitioners of the new science to cure her of her follies, and abandoning herself to them. Her follies included carrying on nineteenth-century-style romances (in the Austrian corruption of the Russian manner) mostly with military men; displaying herself in public in the most extreme, provocative and bare fashions of the day; and catastrophic ventures in the worlds of finance and the arts.

  Madame Landsmann’s affairs were objectionable to her husband and to her in-laws on diverse grounds. That the wife of Rudolf Landsmann should be unfaithful was so shocking more need not be said, his mother and sisters felt. As Olga Landsmann, Rudolf’s more worldly sister-in-law, told the story later, Kamilla’s lack of discretion was offensive. In short, she was stupid. “The point is not what Kamilla does,” Olga had tried to argue with Rudolf, “but why do I have to hear about it? And why does it have to come to the ears of your poor mother?” Rudolf agreed that this was just the point. It wasn’t serious, Kamilla’s affairs. The point was the public display, public adoration; how could he explain to Olga, who hadn’t read Freud, that his wife wasn’t really unfaithful (a point which didn’t seem to concern his sister-in-law either), that it was her neurosis, she couldn’t help it—hopefully she would get over it after some years of analysis. The style in which she conducted her affairs, the costumes, settings, her choice of conspicuous military men, public figures, artists, etc., belonged to the pattern of her neurosis. Flaunting herself, not to hurt or disgrace him, no—Rudolf insisted, seeing his sister-in-law’s eyes pop, knowing she thought him a fool, “...the agonies of guilt that poor woman suffered!”

  “A bitch,” she claimed, “women like that existed before Freud and all this fancy talk with complexes and compulsions. It’s nothing new; a spoiled woman, a vain woman, a selfish woman, using a man, making a fool of him; there’s nothing original about your Kamilla.”

  “It’s a sickness,” he pleaded, “I didn’t say she was original. There are thousands of cases. All humanity is sick. She is a classic case.”

  “I say she is a bitch.”

  “We analysts call it a sickness.”

  The family continued to bewail the pity and shame of Rudolf’s childless marriage the more vehemently as he grew more esteemed and prosperous. Divorce her. Let her have a child, they nagged. In due time there was both a child and a divorce.

  When Kamilla announced, for the seventh time in the last ten years, that she was in the blessed state, the family was skeptical. Six weeks pregnant and not turning green? In the eighth week of Kamilla’s pregnancy events took a precipitous turn. Rabbi Moses, who had been ailing since the war, was approaching his end. The signs were clear even though it was only a light bronchitis that brought the Rabbi to bed: all male members of the Landsmann clan went wrong in the head shortly before the angel of death called.

  “It is very strange,” the Rabbi remarked one day at meal. “I eat and eat and nothing comes out.” For a fortnight now, he claimed it had been thus with him.

  The next day his youngest son, a medical student, insisted on accompanying him into the water closet. It was a Sabbath afternoon and the Rabbi’s wife sat with her daughters-in-law; Kamilla in a fashionable maternity garb, although Grandmother Landsmann, feeling boldly her belly, found scarcely a bulge. The ladies saw the door open and the Rabbi pass through the room toward his study sighing, “I eat and eat and nothing comes out,” and young Benji holding a clump of excrement in each hand and crying, “But Papa, Papa, look!”

  At the end of the week he came down with a fever and within ten days he died. So it was with all male Landsmanns.

  Now everything turned on whether the wife of the favorite son of Rabbi Moses would produce a boy to bear his name.

  Five months pregnant, Kamilla was received with excitement by the Rabbi’s widow and her sisters-in-law. The child’s sex was a decided matter. “How is little Moses?” Grandmother would ask, embracing her daughter-in-law with more than usual affection.

  By Olga Landsman’s account, a nurse reported that Rudolf Landsmann burst into the hospital crying, “My son! Where is my son!” Shown a swaddled infant, he rushed to the phone booth.

  Olga, Rudolf’s sister-in-law, summoned to the scene by the jubilant phone call, looked hard at the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked infant who was wearing a kerchief on its head, a curious detail, perhaps to protect its ears from the draft; several nurses, and then the aunt, remarked its resemblance to a peasant girl. The sister-in-law raised her eyebrows. “Who said it was a boy?” she asked and proceeded to remove not the infant’s kerchief but its diaper and, after a significant pause, repeated before the abashed father and nurses, “Who said it was a boy?”

  According to the same aunt, Rudolf Landsmann turned white then purple. “It’s not possible,” he muttered and ran out of the room. In less than half an hour, however, he returned to his natural color and headed straight to the crib without a glance at his sister-in-law or anyone. He lifted the infant and, pressing it to his bosom, cooed to it and rocked it, oblivious to all. When his sister-in-law was about to leave, he looked up, “Mama knows already—”

  Whether Kamilla was more relieved than disappointed by the birth of a daughter must be left to conjecture. The regret she expressed three decades later at not having produced three daughters to her one daughter is difficult to reconcile with fact. If motherhood did not improve Kamilla’s character or, in Rudolf Landsmann’s terminology, cure her of her neurosis, the Landsmann family may have been partly to blame.

  “The very image of her father!” “A true Landsmann!” they cooed, gathering around the infant’s crib, and appropriated it by the bent of its nose, the shape of its mouth, and any sound or movement it made. As for Kamilla, she acted the part assigned to her in the family scenario. She delivered a child. Now she was no longer needed. Rudi had his sweetheart. She would have her sweethearts.

  The family drama reached its denouement in the spring of 1938: Kamilla announced her decision to marry a young journalist, Zoltan Vithezy; Rudolf agreed to the divorce. On March 12, Hitler marched into Austria. When Isidor and Olga Landsmann saw the Nazi flag waving from the Austrian embassy from their apartment window across the street, they made their decision to emigrate to America and persuaded Rudolf, along with his ten-year-old daughter, to join them.

  It was a long journey for Rudolf Landsmann from the orthodox synagogue in Galanta to a three-story frame house in Garfield, New York. The narrator must pause. A wing of the newly erected psychiatric center is to be dedicated to her father, and she must fly to Garfield to attend the unveiling ceremonies and the formal dinner in his honor. He has asked her to come a day before and to stay over the weekend. How can she refuse?

  He calls to confirm the time of her arrival, anxious and apologetic, “I realize it is a burden and a nuisance,” he says. “You know how I feel about public occasions. Sometimes one must conform to other people’s weaknesses...” She assures him there is no need for him to worry, even if in every other respect he could not count on her as a daughter, she understands what is required of her on public occasions. Not to be present at this event would be unthinkable. “That’s what I think, too,” he says with satisfaction. �
��Did you get my letter?” he asks, “I wrote you a long letter in answer to your questions. You should get it tomorrow. Why are you suddenly interested in these things?...I could tell so much more. But you will be here soon.”

  ...YOU ASK how did my mother manage in Galanta. She had twelve children. Two died. She was either pregnant or breastfed the babies. Therefore she hardly had menstruations. Mother did not stay in bed more than a day after delivery. She got up and worked. When visitors came she jumped quickly into bed to be congratulated.

  THE APPLE SCENE

  Mother prepared our school lunch. We were at the exit door to leave for school. Before me were two or three brothers. Mother handed our bags to us. I was the last in line. Mother stood near me and gave me an apple, what the others did not get. (Fruit was a rare thing.) The others noticed this, Mother and I were embarrassed. All my brothers—in front of me—hated me, though they didn’t show this. Only by innuendos. I was in the middle. The elders wanted to rule over me, the youngers to exploit me. All were in my way. I fought against both sides. I was isolated, but I was the stronger. (“Der Starke ist am mächtigsten allein”—Freud about himself, quoted Goethe.)

  LITTLE SAMUEL’S DEATH