A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  When even Dr. Fliess began doubting his reports, Dr. Freud almost washed his hands of the case.

  At the same time, although the sanatorium was quite a distance away for me, I made it my custom to visit Ita for a half hour every evening after work. I was motivated in part by a professional solidarity with Dr. Freud. We disagreed over one thing only: whether the two angels we’d encountered in Fräulein Eckstein’s room were symptomatical or cosmological in nature. I insisted upon the latter, Dr. Freud upon the former.

  “Those so-called visitors from the spirit world,” he constantly tried to assure me, “are nothing but the old symptom reappearing elsewhere, under another guise and with a greater intensity.” He’d draw upon his cigar and blow out a noxious puff of smoke. “Breuer and I call this phenomenon ‘joining in the conversation,’ and it typically represents the illness’s last stand.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you see, the symptom increases in intensity the deeper we penetrate into the relevant pathogenic memory until suddenly it manifests elsewhere — as though another symptom has joined in the conversation! This signals the end, and the symptom soon diminishes or vanishes completely. Also” — here, he lowered his voice — ”much of what you and I imagine we experienced together was due not only to our extreme exhaustion and the stressfulness of the scenario in which we found ourselves, as well as the inordinately late hour, but also — I’m convinced of this — to our ill-advised use of cocaine.”

  “But I partook of no cocaine!”

  “Then to our exhaustion, to the stress of the scenario, to the latish hour, and in your case, Dr. Sammelsohn, to Hennessey and the effects of coital frustration.”

  I could only demur. There seemed to be no talking him out of this position, and though disagreements of lesser import would in later years drive the likes of Adler, Jung, and Ferenczi from the embrace of his affection, my sympathy for Dr. Freud, as well as his for me, remained (at this point) unimpaired, perhaps because, no matter how much we disagreed over the phenomenon of the angels, we had experienced it together.

  My concern for Fräulein Eckstein was, by now, more than professional. Seeing her in the moments before Ita, sensing my presence in the room, animated the Fräulein’s face with her own, I could only shudder at the ravaged woman lying before me. Despite Ita’s girlish attempts to resuscitate her figure with grace and charm, Fräulein Eckstein was wasting away; and as I observed her physical dwindling, I couldn’t hide from myself the knowledge that I was at least partly responsible for it.

  You must understand: as my infatuation with Fräulein Eckstein diminished, my affection for Ita had grown. I’d discovered that we shared a world: a time and a place, and a complete cast of characters from the long-lost Szibotya of our childhood. I’d never before stopped to consider that our wedding had been forced upon her as well, and with as little sympathy shown to her as had been shown to me. Though in wildly differing ways, we’d been hurt by the same people at the same moment. With my vision corrected, I no longer saw Ita as a tool used against me, but as a fellow victim done a similar act of unkindness. Truth be told, though we had not married out of love, and though death had ended our nuptial agreements, we remained married nonetheless by the cruel experience of our wedding, and so I indulged myself (though, as I say, for no more than half an hour a day) in the pleasure of her company. As my affection for her grew, however, so did my concern for her ultimate fate: what was to become of her? In truth, she was everything the angels insisted: cruel, vindictive, haughty, caustic, dismissive, even murderous. (If, in Fräulein Eckstein’s wasting body, she could have overpowered Dr. Freud, I’ve no doubt she would have strangled him to death and left the Fräulein to pay for her crimes.) And yet, because she reserved her bitterness for others, principally for those who had harmed us in our youths, I delighted in her gossipy excoriations and her dead-on impersonations of them. These held a very real pleasure for me; and over the course of these few weeks, we started to resemble newlyweds not a little. Entering her room, my heart would lift, and I’d call to her pleasantly. She’d respond, delighted to see me. I’d sit upon her bed and reach for her hand. She’d sit up, as an invalid might, and in a voice at times faint, at times strong, tell me of her day, of her therapeutic encounters with Dr. Freud, of the strategies she’d employed in outmaneuvering him. I laughed with her against him. We ridiculed his vanity, his overweening pomposity, his outrageous infatuation with the donkey-headed Fliess. She commiserated over the social tumult he’d put me through, pleading with me to drop him as a friend. Despite her disastrous suicide, or rather because of it, she’d become something of an actual wife to me and, if only for twenty or thirty minutes each evening, I finally experienced what my father in his rage would have denied his only son: the loving ministrations of a devoted wife.

  “Are you getting enough to eat, Yankele?” she’d typically say to me. “Because you look so thin and peaked. Are you sleeping enough? You can sleep with me here if you wish,” she’d say, making this offer in a low voice, all innocence and voluptuous generosity.

  On other nights, she’d confessed her most intimate fears: “Oh, sometimes, Yankele, when I huddle against this Eckstein, I can’t tell who is clinging to whom, and we wail over our fates like two lonely spinsters! All she wanted was to give Dr. Freud a case that would make his name! They’d tour the continent together, staging demonstrations in the capitals of the world. He’d come to love her, to prefer her, not only to his wife but to that sister-in-law of his (with whom she’s convinced he’s having an affair, though perhaps it’s just her jealousy that tells her so). What will become of us, Yankl? Eckstein’s dying, I’m dead, and both our loves are thwarted!”

  Each night, as I bid her good evening, placing a firm and brotherly kiss upon her brow, she’d pull me to her, holding my hands against her breasts, imploring me, so that Dr. Freud, settling now into his chair at the foot of her bed, couldn’t hear: “Lie with me, Yankl! Make me your wife — ravish me, claim the tokens of my maidenhood — they belong to you! — and I’ll release all my captives. I swear it. You, Dr. Freud, Eckstein. I’ll gladly burn in Gehenna if I can burn in the fire of your embrace first!”

  I admit: these pleas became increasingly difficult to resist. I was a bachelor, after all, and a sexual maladroit, a man without a mistress in a world where unmarried women did not lie with men except if they were hired to do so. (Married women, then as now, slept with whomever they wished.) Only one thing kept my resolve in check: I didn’t trust Ita. I trusted her neither to do what she promised nor to refrain from committing worse crimes once her demands were met. As every schoolboy knew, a dybbuk may use any opening to enter the body of a sinner. If I kissed her lips or plunged into her body via its even more enticing orifices, I feared she’d abandon Fräulein Eckstein and take up permanent residence inside me, thus effectively fulfilling the commandment for a man and wife to become one flesh.

  (A curious note: Though Dr. Freud admitted to believing in none of this, the day after our encounter with and , he paid a young scholar, one of Rabbi Chajes’s boys, to hang a mezuzah on the doorpost of Fräulein Eckstein’s room. “Why not?” He shrugged casually. “The sickrooms of Christians all have crucifixes on their walls.”)

  CHAPTER 20

  Certainly the tools of psychoanalysis were as precise as any surgeon’s scalpel, but a doctor’s instruments are only as profound as the doctor himself. This much was clear to Dr. Freud. Though he continued to work with Ita nightly, and though she began to submit grudgingly to his psychoanalytic probing, hers was proving to be an even more demanding case than he’d originally thought. Unlike with his normal run of neurotics and hysterics, it was no longer a question of uncovering a single childhood trauma buried beneath the rubble of a disintegrating personality. With Ita, there was no primal scene, no early experience of seduction, nor even a small chain of events that, once interpreted, would magically relieve all of her symptoms. Instead, she presented Dr. Freud with a series of lives. He
r psychoanalytic history chronicled well over five thousand years, with one life ending (usually in disaster) and another beginning (always bright with hope and a breathtaking sense of innocence), each life ignited, like a chain smoker’s cigarette, by the fiery destruction of the one preceding it.

  Dr. Freud began to worry that in rejecting notions he’d previously considered superstitious trifles — reincarnation, divine justice, the constant identity of the soul — he had unnecessarily limited psychoanalysis’s scope. True, not every patient would be able to recall all of her past lives; not everyone would be fortunate enough to attend her analytic hour in the guise of a dybbuk — certainly the constellation of events allowing Ita to do so would be difficult to replicate in the laboratory of clinical practice — still Dr. Freud was at times hopeful, at times despairing, that he’d soon discover a way to reach all his patients and not merely the dead ones, until each could make a full accounting of his soul’s entire history.

  “And yet, at other times, and more generally,” he confessed to me, one freezing April evening at the Guglhupf, where he’d asked me to join him, “I feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. As soon as I’ve solved the issues of one of Ita’s lives, another five appear!”

  “Ita’s lives?” I said, and he nodded. “If I’m understanding you correctly then, you now believe you’re speaking with Ita?”

  “Believe? Disbelieve?” Dr. Freud puffed on his cigar. “Science is not a church, Dr. Sammelsohn, that I must formally declare my vows before entering its precincts. Do I believe I’m speaking to your former wife? Not at all! I’ve merely silenced my critical apparatus long enough to listen to the wishes of Fräulein Eckstein’s other voice, a voice that has gone to great trouble to make itself known to us, and to address it in the language of its choosing. From Dr. Breuer’s poor example, you see, I’ve learned the importance of acknowledging the dignity of all hysterical symptoms. And yet …” I waited for him to continue. “We must be strict with ourselves.” He sighed and looked at his hands. “If we admit that these miraculous stories from the ancient past are beyond our testing; if, in our opinion, they cannot be substantiated; mustn’t we concede that they cannot, strictly speaking, be disproved either? In the absence of hard, scientific evidence that dybbuks don’t exist, isn’t it more scientific to hold out the possibility that they might?”

  “I’m astonished to hear you say such a thing,” I told him.

  “Our science is young, Dr. Sammelsohn, and we’ve no idea where these procedures will lead us. Perhaps only when we’re done with the voyage will we know for certain where we have been. In any case, thank you for meeting me here tonight.”

  Dr. Freud called for the waiter and instructed him to push two tables together. He next unrolled an enormous chart across the two tabletops. From his medical bag, he took out pens and bottles of ink, the sort medical illustrators use, and, from the inside pocket of his vest, a small quantity of scraps.

  As he unfolded these, I saw that his handwriting covered both sides in chaotic fashion.

  “Notes from another mad session,” he explained. “Tonight’s, in fact. Many of them concerning you.” He removed his coat and hung it on the back of his chair. “Let me just ink these in and I’ll explain everything to you at once.”

  He bent over the chart and, consulting his notes, began filling in the data. I’d never seen him quite so excited. Pacing round the tables, the way an artist might a half-finished canvas, he slurped at his coffee without looking at the cup. His hair hung down in loose strands before his eyes. His tie was unknotted, his vest unbuttoned. Ink colored his fingers; and his cuffs, despite the precaution he took, were soon busy with stains.

  “Waiter!” he cried again after a moment, standing back to judge his work. “Two more coffees, and make them strong — oh, and two snifters of brandy as well!”

  Returning to the chart, he corrected some small slips of his pen with a chamois. The waiter brought our drinks, placing everything on a table nearby, his calm manner in direct contradiction to Dr. Freud’s agitation, an agitation that was proving contagious. I was trembling with nervousness myself.

  “Given the depth of the psyche,” I said to Dr. Freud, “mightn’t it be preferable to remain blind to one’s former lives? Perhaps man is not meant to know himself quite so completely.”

  Dr. Freud held his notes before his face and squinted to read them. “This isn’t the best place for this work, I’m afraid,” he said, moving closer to the lamp.

  I continued, “If Heaven or happenstance or even human incuriosity sees fit to erect a curtain between who a man thinks he is and his deeper self, should a man really take advantage of a rip in the fabric to peek through that curtain?”

  Dr. Freud grunted noncommittally.

  “Mightn’t one be opening a Pandora’s box that could affect the course of one’s entire life?”

  Dr. Freud glanced up, frowning like a man who’d bitten into an unripe lime. “Don’t be absurd, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said, cleaning his pen with his tongue and drying it on his chamois, and instantly I felt that he was right. Only a man content with his own smallness would walk away from the Faustian bargain: isn’t knowledge of one’s true self worth losing everything, including one’s soul? and didn’t Dr. Faust beat the Devil in the end, simply by proclaiming his belief in God? or was it his belief in Christ?

  If the former, I felt emboldened; if the latter, not as much.

  Dr. Freud rolled down his sleeves and clipped his cufflinks through his cuffs. He buttoned his vest and laced the golden chain of his watch through the slits in its fabric. With a lighted cigar in his hand, he brushed back his hair. Raising two fingers to his lips as though he were about to whistle, he instead fixed the part in his mustache.

  “Come. Let us have a look,” he said. “It’s a trifle inelegant perhaps, but it was the only way I could keep track of all the information Ita was spewing forth.”

  He and I bent over the chart spread out across the two tabletops. In scarlet ink, Dr. Freud had sketched in all the incarnations Ita had recalled, as though each were an entry in a genealogical record of a large family, with lines branching off from each persona to its relevant events and relationships.

  For example:

  In blue, he’d charted the incarnations of Zusha, Ita’s grandfather, who appeared now as her husband, now as her wife, now as her master, now as her lover, her owner, or her slave. Across the long plain of Jewish history, these two had shared a combustible relationship, taking turns murdering or being murdered by each other. Discovering each other in every life, one always taking the other by surprise, one always gaining the upper hand, neither seemed to realize that a person pays in the next life with his own for the lives he takes in this one.

  Charted in green ink, my father (or his various incarnations) appeared periodically as well, always at a polite distance, always facilitating, through his ignorance, the meeting of these two incompatibles.

  “Of course, the whole thing is necessarily simplified in this graphic form,” Dr. Freud told me. “Every detail is highly overdetermined.”

  In gold, he’d documented the appearance and disappearance of a fortune Ita had spent all her lives chasing. Having earned it in one life, she’d lose it in the next, only to inherit it in another after Zusha had stolen it during a life in between. In a similar vein, in pink, Dr. Freud had traced a strain of syphilis Ita first contracted in the eleventh century from a parish priest. Dr. Freud cracked his knuckles and pointed at the chart. “Follow the chain of syphilis, Dr. Sammelsohn, and you’ll see that time and again, every few lives, Ita reinfects herself. It goes round and round in a configuration I can only describe, on this chart anyway, as a double helix.”

  (Once again, as with the cocaine — but more on this below — a blind Freud had found his way to a treasure that, for whatever reason, he couldn’t see.)

  Pointing with his pen, he brought my attention to other entries marked in red. “Look closely here, Dr. Sammelsohn, and you can see the am
azing role fire seems to play in so many of lives.” He tapped his chart with an unlit cigar. “Here, as you can see, she destroys a country church, burning its congregants and its vicar to cinders, only to suffer the same cruel fate three-quarters of a century later as a burgher in the Alps. Here, she drowns her own children; there, a thousand years later, she is drowned. Here, she swindles; there, she is murdered by swindlers.”

  “And what’s all this?” I said, pointing to various mathematical calculations littering the margins of the chart.

  “Nothing, just nonsense,” Dr. Freud said, “just some details of each person’s nose and various notations concerning cycles of twenty-three and twenty-eight, information I’d gathered in the hopes of enticing Wilhelm’s interest in the project, but I’m sorry to say he considers the work beneath his scientific dignity, and I’ve come to doubt the data is of more than dubious value.”

  I could feel Dr. Freud watching me.

  “You’re looking for yourself, of course,” he said.

  “Of course,” I admitted.

  “Yes, but, you see, I’ve intentionally left you, as an item, off.”

  “And why is that?”

  “So that, having arranged to meet you here tonight, I might show you the chart and consult with you upon its meaning without compromising your medical objectivity. Your collaboration is proving far too precious for me to render its potency null by implicating you into the equation. Tonight, after you’ve taken a look, I’ll go home and fill in the rest. I have only to ink in the matters pertaining to you. I possess a certain amount of information about where you, or more precisely your soul, has been for the last few thousand years.”

  “But …” I could only protest.

  “Also,” Dr. Freud said, stopping me, “I’m not certain at this point how much of this information I can share with you without violating Ita’s confidentiality, to say nothing of Fräulein Eckstein’s.”