A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  I could barely look her in the eye, neither in the good one, nor in the one with the drooping lid. I endured the ceremony, in order not to embarrass her, but I’d hatched a plan.

  “Ita, my dear,” I spoke as gently as I could when, after the ceremony, we were left alone in a private room, as is our religious custom.

  “Muh dee-uhr,” she repeated numbly. As you will recall, such repetitions formed the whole of her vocabulary.

  She in her virginal white, I in my Hasidic wedding garb, we sat on either side of an elegant table set intimately for two and piled high — the vindictive irony of my father knew no bounds! — with the finest of foods: whole broiled chickens sprinkled with rosemary, roasted potatoes, savory onions, spicy kasha, exotic grapes, prunes, raisins, nuts. I stuffed everything I could into the small bag I had concealed beneath my talis katan.

  “Ita must listen now,” I instructed her.

  “Eee-taw mush l-l-l-lee-sun,” she said, nodding, her eye with the drooping lid glazed and unfocused, the other one sharp and clear. With an upward motion, she rubbed her wrist against the bottom of her nose and smeared away the snot.

  “Yankl must go.”

  “Unkull gaw?” she said, picking at a scab on her dirty knee.

  “Yes. Far, far away. To Vienna.”

  “Unkull gaw fuh wai?”

  I had my doubts about how much the poor girl understood. Surely she possessed no accurate sense of time or distance, nor enough mind to imagine that a life with me was what this wedding was supposed to mean. Surely an hour after I climbed out the window (for such was my plan), she would forget about the events of this late afternoon, this odd wedding, no different, really, from the thousand and one cruelties to which she’d been subjected during her short life. Marrying Ita in a mock ceremony and having to kiss the bride was a game that not only the cruelest children but all of us had played. Still I was struck by the tears that appeared in her downturned eyes.

  “Ita, listen,” I whispered.

  She nodded, and her mouth was open. She breathed through it, and I could see her tongue twitching like a restless sleeper in its bed.

  “They will ask Ita where Yankl go.”

  “Wuh Unkull gaw?” She seemed in all sincerity to have asked this question, although I knew that was impossible. Agitated, she further twisted the lilies she was still holding in her small, stubby hands.

  “Ita must tell them …”

  “Eee-taw taw-al,” she confirmed in her plodding, monstrous voice.

  “Say to them: Yankl goes to liberate the masses from religious and political oppression.”

  She repeated the sentence in her sluggish, slurred way, faltering over the final difficult word.

  “Oppression,” I repeated.

  “Uh-preh-shzun!”

  “Again!”

  “Ug-gun.”

  “No, Ita. Say ‘oppression’ again.”

  She tried the sentence again.

  “Good, Ita!”

  “Goo Eee-taw!” She pointed to the cleft of her chest.

  “Tell them: Shame on you, you pious frauds.”

  She gargled the phrases fiercely.

  “Tell them that Ita looks forward to the day when you bourgeois parasites will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

  She repeated my words as well as she could, and she surprised me by spitting on the ground.

  “Good enough,” I said.

  “Nah, naht eee-nuf,” she said.

  “No, it is, it is, it’s good enough, Ita.”

  “Eee-nuf,” she seemed to plead suddenly, reaching out to me, but of course she had no idea what she was saying. “Yunkull!” she shrieked.

  I had by this time pulled back the heavy drapery and had opened the window and was already halfway out of it, sitting with one leg dangling over the outer wall and one leg on the sill.

  “Ita, what is it?”

  She spoke with more difficulty than usual. “Eee-taw … iz … bride tew you.”

  “No.”

  “Iz bri-i-id!” she insisted.

  “It was a joke, Ita, a silly joke. A trick, that’s all.”

  “D’rik?”

  “A play. Like a Purim play.”

  “Boo-reem?”

  “And now that play is over, you see, or almost. One scene more to go. Where has Yankl gone? … Ita?”

  “Unkull gaw li-ber-ate maz-sez frahm ree-lee-jee-uss a-an-duh poleee-tee-kul …” she faltered.

  “Oppression.”

  “Upp …”

  “It’s not important. They won’t listen to you anyway.”

  “Up-reh-shzun!” she said.

  “Good. And who’s to blame?”

  “Sh-sh-shay-mmm awn ye-e-u pi-jus … frowds!” she cried with a sense of conviction that was truly alarming.

  “Good for you, Ita,” I said. “Excellent, excellent. That’s fine. But now I’ve got to go.”

  “Taw lee-ber-ate maz-ses, Yunkull?”

  “Yes, to liberate the Jewish masses, Ita. One poor Jew at a time. Starting with myself.”

  “Guh-buh, ma-iiii huh-huhzs-bund,” she said softly.

  “No, Ita, not husband, not really. It was only a play.”

  “Bor-eem p’lai.”

  “Yes, that’s right, a Purim play.”

  She cut a forlorn figure, with her hump and her paralyzed arm and her drooping eyelid and the shapeless white dress they had made for her out of God knows what cheap muslin.

  “Good-bye, my love,” I whispered to her as sweetly as I could.

  “Guh-buh, mufh luh-fff?”

  I was about to drop from the window to the ground when she called my name, her face straining, as if she were actually thinking and the effort were costing her.

  “Ita?”

  “Huhzs-bund?”

  “No.”

  “Huhzs-bund!” she insisted.

  “No, no husband, Ita. A play.”

  “Yunkull eez huhzs-bund!”

  “No, Ita not wife. Yankl not husband.”

  “Raabai sez!”

  “It was only a play.”

  “AND?” DR. FREUD said.

  I looked through the window of the fiacre. We were far beyond the Ring now, in a district I didn’t know. “I jumped from the window,” I told him. “I couldn’t even see where I landed; my eyes were filled with tears. An hour before, I’d hidden a tailor’s shears in the bushes behind the synagogue, along with a darning needle and a thread, and a mirror. I ran until dark, and I kept running, following the roads, navigating by moonlight and starlight until sleep overtook me. I awoke at dawn the next morning and ate an entire chicken. My wedding feast! Then I set about my work. Two snips and my earlocks were gone. A little tailoring, a little darning, a little thread, and my telltale caftan was an inconspicuous short coat. I regarded myself in the mirror. I was, I thought, utterly transformed. I was picked up later in the day by a merchant on whose spice cart I rode all the way into Vienna. I looked up my uncle Moritz, the family heretic and Father’s bête noire, against whom I’d been warned my entire life, and of course, he took me in and treated me quite warmly, even seeing to my education. Though he begged me to do so, I never bothered divorcing Ita, knowing that it played no practical purpose. They were never going to marry her again. Even those cruel people couldn’t have been that cruel.”

  Dr. Freud was quiet, and I was quiet as well.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn — may I ask?” he said, licking the inside of his lips. “Did you ever speak to Fräulein Eckstein about any of this?”

  “Most assuredly not.”

  “Nor about Hindele, your previous wife?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Nothing about life in Szibotya?”

  “I assure you, Dr. Freud, on the occasions Fräulein Eckstein and I met, I could barely get an edge in wordwise.”

  “Troubling,” Dr. Freud said. “Troubling, indeed. And yet, as scientists, there is naught for us to do but analyze each datum as it presents itself. Let me apprise you on ho
w things currently stand.”

  ACCORDING TO DR. Freud, after the episode in my apartment, he’d renewed his efforts with Fräulein Eckstein and all seemed well for a time, until inexplicably the patient began hemorrhaging again from her nose. Her nasal passages swelled, and a fetid odor set in.

  “I tried irrigating her,” he said, “but there seemed to be an obstacle inside. I called in Dr. Gersuny, who inserted a drainage tube into her nose, hoping things would work themselves out once a discharge was reestablished.” Dr. Freud shook his head. “Two days later, she was bleeding again, profusely this time. As Gersuny wasn’t available till evening, I called in Dr. Rosanes, who started cleaning the area, removing blood clots, and the next moment, for no discernible reason, out shot a flood of blood.”

  “Oh my!” I said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Freud said. “The Fräulein turned white, her eyes bulged, she lost her pulse. Rosanes quickly packed her to stop the hemorrhaging, but the poor creature was quite unrecognizable, lying flat on her back. That’s when something quite strange happened.”

  “And what was that?”

  “A foreign body came out.”

  “A foreign body?”

  “Ita,” he confirmed, looking at me with a seemingly infinite need for compassion. He raised his chest and sighed. “I felt sick,” he confessed. “After the Fräulein had been packed, I fled to the next room and drank a bottle of water. The brave Frau Doktor, Fräulein Eckstein’s sister-in-law, was kind enough to bring me a small glass of Cognac, and I became myself again. What could I do? Nothing. And so I arranged for the poor unfortunate to be brought to the Sanatorium Loew, where we are going now, and when I returned to the room, shaken, she greeted me with the condescending remark, ‘So this is the strong sex!’ Only …” He hesitated.

  “Yes?” I encouraged him.

  “It wasn’t Fräulein Eckstein speaking.”

  “No?”

  “But Frau Sammelsohn.”

  “Ita, you’re saying?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dr. Freud said warily.

  “And,” I stammered, “what exactly made you think it was Ita who was addressing you?”

  The tone of my voice had sharpened to a lethal point, and Dr. Freud was forced to reconsider his approach.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn, I apologize for throwing all this at you as though it were a bucket of water and you had caught on fire. How did I know it was Ita? An excellent question. Well, the voice was different, for one thing, and she introduced herself to me as such.”

  It was hard to know how to reply. The urbane, skeptical man of science had simply disappeared. Before my very eyes, Dr. Freud had transformed himself into just another credulous Jew. I looked down at my hands and brought my fingers together.

  “Forgive me, Dr. Freud, for my” — I struggled to find the appropriate word — “blockheadedness, I suppose you’d call it, but are you suggesting to me that Ita has died, an occurrence of which, until this very moment, I’ve learned nothing, neither from my sisters nor from my mother, whose correspondence I receive periodically, and that she has returned to haunt me, through Fräulein Eckstein, as a dybbuk?”

  “No, of course not!” Dr. Freud cried. Relaxing a bit, he even laughed. “To believe such a thing in this age of electrical lights and gramophones …” He ruffled his hair with his hand, knocking his hat askew. “No, as I’ve said, it’s clear that yesteryear’s demonical possession corresponds entirely to the hysteria of our time. However” — and here he grew rigid and troubled again — “one cannot dismiss out of hand one’s patients’ delusions without threatening the therapeutic bond, you see. And so I’m afraid we’ve no choice but to accept — provisionally, provisionally, of course — whatever the patient brings to us until we can demonstrate to her the falseness of her own claims.”

  Dr. Freud reminded me of a story he’d told me once before: encountering Bertha Pappenheim (the not-yet-famous Anna O.) in the throes of an hysterical pregnancy, calling out ‘Here comes Dr. B’s baby, here comes Dr. B’s baby,’ Dr. Breuer had run from her bedside all the way to Italy, fleeing the scene and, in his bourgeois cowardice, leaving his patient in less competent hands.

  “The instant Breuer told me this story,” Dr. Freud said, gritting his teeth, “I resolved never to allow myself to be similarly unmanned by a lack of analytic nerve.”

  WE RODE FOR a moment in silence, the tattoo of the horses’ hooves muffled by the snow.

  “It’s odd,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “But as a child, I was present at a dybbuk possession.”

  With his handkerchief pressed against his nostril, Dr. Freud eyed me with a somewhat astonished, somewhat indulgent look of irritation. “My God, Sammelsohn, you’re like Burton returned from Medina with a thousand and one tales of the mysterious East!”

  “Well, it’s not the sort of thing one talks about freely,” I confessed. In fact, these were tales I’d never told anyone, but especially not Dr. Freud, who, regarding them with his jaundiced medical eye, I feared would see in them evidence for all sorts of psychopathologies on my part. Also, although I knew them to be true, somehow in the bright splendor of Vienna, they seemed, though exotic or odd or piquant, utterly and ultimately false. And yet my friend Shaya and I had hidden beneath Khave Kaznelson’s bed the day Vladek the Wagon Driver entered her as a dybbuk.

  He was a terrible man, this Vladek, a drunkard who, it was said, murdered his customers if he suspected they were carrying diamonds or gold. Leaving the bodies by the roadside, he’d claimed that bandits had done the killings and sometimes wounded himself in the foot or the arm in order to make his story appear more convincing to the police.

  Of course, at first no one knew that it was Vladek who had entered Khave’s body. Summoned to her bedside by her frantic husband, the rebbe asked the spirit to identify itself.

  “Who are you, spirit?” he demanded, speaking as forcefully as I’d ever heard him, and he was one of those screamers whose shrill exhortations could make the wood mites fall out of the ceiling beams of the shul.

  “Why should I talk to you, you filthy Jew?” the voice roared back in a coarse, masculine way. “Send for a priest! I’m a good Christian and demand a proper exorcism!”

  The rebbe would hear none of it. “Since, wicked creature, you have taken it into your head to inhabit a goodwife of Israel, a lamb for whom I am the shepherd, you shall deal with me instead.”

  “A goodwife?” the voice scoffed. “Now there’s a laugh!”

  “Silence!” the rebbe demanded.

  “Why, when I could tell you a story or two?”

  As though with one breath, a gasp erupted from the crowd ringing Khave Kaznelson’s bed.

  “I want the children out of here! out!” the rebbe screamed.

  We thought we were safe enough, Shaya and I, unseen beneath the bed, huddled on our stomachs, our fists balled against our ribs, but over Shaya’s shoulders, I saw two large hands appear, then the tip of a beard, then an angry eye. As the hands manacled themselves around Shaya’s ankles, I felt the same thing happening to mine. The next thing I knew, we were sliding away from each other. “Yankl!” he cried, throwing out his hands like rescue ropes before him. I did the same, our fingers locking, but we were dragged apart, lifted out on either side of Khave Kaznelson’s bed, and held there, each of us in the arms of a strong man, like Torah scrolls on either side of the bimah during the blessings for the month of Teves. Of course, we struggled to break free, but we were helpless to do so.

  However, when Vladek spoke next — “Why bother me? What trouble am I causing you?” — everyone seemed to forget about us. Held above her bed, I saw with my own eyes that Vladek’s voice emanated not from Khave Kaznelson’s mouth, but from her throat, where there was an unnaturally large bulge.

  “The children,” the rebbe commanded, “remove them, I say!”

  We were trundled out, passed from hand to hand, like buckets in a fire brigade.

  “I, Vladek the Wagon Driver, am a murder
er! Cursed be the law of God which seeks my destruction!” was the last thing I heard before the bedroom door was slammed. We raced outside the house, but the children watching through the windows were already four lines deep, though the curtains had been drawn, and no one could see anything at all.

  AS I FEARED, Shaya and I were summoned to the rebbe’s study that evening. Naturally enough, we believed we were in trouble, and naturally enough, we’d each constructed an alibi that exonerated himself while incriminating his friend. Sitting outside the rebbe’s door on a cold, hard bench, I’d noticed that the nails of my hands were black beneath their tips. I scraped the dirt out with the corner of a tooth and had my hand in my mouth when Reb Yudel opened the study door. “Have you no shmatte?” he asked with a scowl. “Well then, wipe the spittle on your pants.” I rubbed my hand against my knee, while Reb Yudel muttered, “Stupid boy.”

  It seemed to take years to cross the room with Reb Yudel pinching at our necks. Our legs moved numbly; we didn’t seem to be advancing at all. The rebbe sat in the corner of the room behind his desk, reading by candlelight, half his face illuminated by the flame, the other half in shadow. He seemed not to be getting any larger as we approached him, until suddenly, there he was, an enormous figure looming above us.

  “Sit,” Reb Yudel commanded us, and we sat. Or more precisely: he dropped us into our chairs. After what seemed like a thousand years, the rebbe looked up from his book, the one eye lit by the candlelight peering at Shaya and me, before gravitating slowly upwards towards Reb Yudel. “Thank you, Yudel,” the rebbe said. “You may leave us now.”

  I could hear Reb Yudel’s footsteps receding behind me, though I dared not look. His departure seemed to take forever, during which time the rebbe kept his gaze in alignment (or so I calculated) with Reb Yudel’s back. His soft, papery hands, though one clutched the other, hardly seemed to be touching. Finally, the click-clacking of the door’s opening and shutting sounded and after an eternity of silence, the rebbe lowered his gaze and took us in.