A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “You don’t know how long you’ve been waiting for this, Yankl, but I do.”

  “Ita.” I gulped for breath.

  She placed a hand tenderly on my cheek. “Darling, let’s not speak.”

  “But I love you,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

  She leaned back and looked at me as though I’d suddenly gone mad.

  “I mean it,” I told her. “I love you. Is that so very strange?” I moved in to kiss her again, but she pushed me away, both of her hands flat against my chest.

  “And you expect me to believe that?”

  Her question caught me off-guard. “Why wouldn’t you believe it?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

  “To say the very least.”

  “No, and neither were you!” She crossed her arms angrily. Looking away from me, she recrossed her arms and sneered, as though she sensed she were being made the butt of some unfortunate joke.

  “Ita, surely you must know by now that I’m sincere in my affections.”

  “Right, right, right.” She laughed an ugly little laugh. “If it weren’t for Eckstein, do you really think you’d even be here?”

  “If it weren’t for Eckstein?”

  “‘If it weren’t for Eckstein?’” she mimicked me, lowering her voice and parodying mine.

  “What does Fräulein Eckstein have to do with any of this?”

  “You know you only want to save her!”

  “But I don’t!” I cried. “I mean, certainly, I did. At first. No, you’re right. At first, it was true. I was appalled at her situation. But now …”

  “But now?” Ita hugged her knees to her chest and planted her chin on top of them.

  “But now — oh, it’s so difficult to say this, really. But now I don’t care a fig about Emma Eckstein!” The truth of this sentiment was terrifying to speak aloud, and I retreated from it immediately. “No, of course, I do. I do care about her. Of course, I care. Who wouldn’t? Don’t misunderstand me. I think it’s terrible what’s happened to her, unfortunate in the extreme — ”

  “Yes, it’s unfortunate.” Ita sneered again. “It’s unfortunate that I’m so very evil!”

  “But even under these circumstances, Ita” — I sighed — “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She closed her eyes and cocked her ear towards me. “You don’t?” she said in the voice of a little girl. “Really?”

  I grasped her hand and kissed it. “Ita, listen to me. I’ve hungered for you — if Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic techniques have any scientific validity, and I believe they do — for well over three thousand years! And now I’m simply fed up with waiting.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “And you love me?”

  “I do.”

  She leaned back against the pillows of her bed. She laughed, showing all of Fräulein Eckstein’s pretty white teeth. “You love me?”

  “I do, Ita. Really.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  She kissed me. But then her face darkened, and her hands began to tremble. I doubted at first what I was seeing, but it appeared that tears had moistened her eyes. She bowed her head and brought her two hands, flat against each other, to her face, pursing her lips against her two index fingers. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked at me before her expression crumbled into a ruin of despair.

  “Yankl,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I want to be worthy of your love.”

  “Worthy?”

  “No, I want to be worthy of you.”

  “But you are worthy, Ita!”

  “No, I’m not. Just look at me! Look at me, Yankl,” she said with real disgust. “I can’t stay here.”

  I attempted to kiss her again. “But of course you can,” I said, cupping her breast in my hand.

  “No, don’t. Don’t!” She pushed me away. “It’s too … vulgar!” She frowned.

  “Vulgar?”

  “Our meeting like this! Oh, Yankl.” She stroked my face, drawing me near. She kissed me again, her tears spilling onto my cheeks. “But you’re so sweet. No, you’re so good, my darling, you’re so very good and so very sweet.”

  “But I’m not, Ita. I’m not good, nor am I sweet, but I love you, and I want to make love to you right now.” I could think of no other words with which to press my case.

  “Hold me, Yankl. Hold me in your arms.”

  I embraced her more completely.

  “Yankl?”

  “Yes, my darling?”

  She took a moment and exhaled a deep breath. “I have to leave you now.”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “No, I think I have to leave you.”

  “Ita! Please!”

  She brought her fingers to my lips, as though to silence me, and I kissed them, and she kissed my lips through them.

  “I’ll be so lonely without you,” I said.

  “Then promise me you’ll wait for me,” she said.

  “But you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Promise me, Yankl!”

  “Of course I promise,” I said.

  “Swear to it!”

  “Very well. I swear.”

  “Swear on all that is holy that you’ll wait for me to be reborn; swear, Yankl.”

  “Of course, I swear that I’ll wait for you to be reborn, my darling.”

  “On God’s holy name and on His holy Torah.”

  “I swear!”

  “Good,” she said. “Now I can go. But how?”

  “Go? Ita, no. You mustn’t! You can’t! Not yet.”

  “Through her ear?”

  “Through her ear? No, we’ll discuss all this later, darling, after we’ve made love.”

  “Through her skin, Yankl, bursting through? No, that’s no good. Through one of her toes?”

  “Let’s just put this off for an hour, shall we?”

  “I can’t, Yankl. You have to understand. It’s not honorable. It wouldn’t be honorable or fair to the Fräulein. It’s not right, and it’s certainly not worthy of your love. Of our love! Now that we’ve found each other again! Please, Yankl. Help me return to God.”

  There seemed to be no dissuading her. Any idiot could see that, and as I sheltered her in my arms, I could feel her hold over Fräulein Eckstein weakening, her grip on the Fräulein giving way, surrendering, the way an orange peel, sliced into, begins to release the meat of its fruit.

  “But how shall I do it, husband?”

  “Let me think,” I said, and I thought back to that odd night all those many years ago when the rebbe had called me into his chambers with my friend Shaya and told us of the exorcism he’d performed hundreds of years before as an Italian rabbi in Padua. Through what avenue had he commanded the darkened spirit of Bernardo Messina to depart from that poor Jewish maid? Was it the ear? Or did that result in hearing problems for the girl? Was it through the skin? Certainly not. The wound would have been too great, too punitive, too dangerous. I remembered something Dr. Freud had said about Josephus, a Rabbi Eleazar, and a magical ring. Was it through the nose? Did he pull the spirit out through the nose? Something about the nose seemed to ring a bell.

  “You’re certain?” Ita said, looking nervously into my eyes.

  I shrugged. “That’s what I seem to recall.”

  Her trembling had grown unusually fierce and the entire bed — indeed, the entire room — seemed to be shaking.

  “Yankl, my husband,” she said.

  I held her as tightly as I could. “My darling?”

  “Kiss me one last time in this world, but do so quickly.” Mustering all her strength, she attempted with only limited success to quiet her tremors, and I kissed her as passionately as her trembling permitted me to do. “Darling, don’t leave me until I’m completely gone.”

  “I shan’t,” I promised.

  “Although you’d better stand away.” />
  Reluctant to abandon her, I nevertheless placed myself against the nearest wall. She lay back in the bed, rigidly at first, but relaxing by degrees. Fräulein Eckstein’s body began convulsing, opening and closing like a pocketknife. These muscular contractions were so fierce that at times she appeared to be hovering in the air, twisting this way and that, shaking and shouting like an epileptic during a seizure, calling out so frightfully, it’s a wonder she didn’t succeed in summoning the entire nursing staff to her room. I recoiled to see her hammering her head against the pillows, beating with her fists against her thighs, screeching horrible garbled sounds, screaming like someone whose tongue had been anaesthetized. Now she seemed to be choking, strangling, her eyes wide in horror; now laughing, as though tickled to the point of nausea. She tried to sit up, a rasping noise coming from deep within her throat. Her arms flailing, she fell back into the sweat-stained sheets. She jerked her lower body up and down. At this point, my vision darkened, I must have been losing consciousness, and I saw, or imagined I saw, a cloud or a gaseous fume forming above her bed. Ring-shaped, the color of a bloody sunset, it seemed to be swirling around her bed, and for a moment I imagined I saw and faces inside it. Fräulein Eckstein struggled in an agony beneath it, until with a propulsive burst, something unseeable exploded through her left nostril with a small starburst of blood.

  “Yankl, my husband, my lover!” Ita called to me, though no longer from inside Fräulein Eckstein’s body. I looked about me and saw nothing other than the Fräulein lying lifeless and bloody atop her blankets and her sheets. Ita’s voice came from inside the rose-colored fumes. “Farewell for now, my darling!” she cried, her voice ringing with a tone of happiness. I was chilled to hear the sharp sound of glass breaking, and a tiny, round opening appeared in the hospital window as though someone had shot a bullet through its pane. The bloody plume was sucked, as though by a vacuum, from the space above me through this hole, and I nearly fainted to hear and voices calling out.

  “A noble heart,” said.

  “Yes,” said, “and he has already received his reward.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I woke up, days later, in Dr. Freud’s consultancy. I looked at the ceiling. A thin veil of cobwebs hung from a beam. Dr. Freud’s hand pressed against my forehead, knocking clumsily into my nose. “Sorry,” he said, readjusting his position. His hand was dry and scratchy. His face was near mine — he sat in a chair next to the sofa — and his breath was a mixture of tobacco, peppermint, and inadequate dental care. I closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.

  When I awoke next, I was in my own bed. I had no idea how much time had passed, nor how I’d gotten there, but I opened my eyes to find Dr. Freud’s bearded face looming over me again. I felt my head; it was bandaged. Weighed down by the covers, I struggled to sit up.

  “Ah, thank Heavens, you’re awake,” he called. “Although I wouldn’t move too fast, if I were you.”

  “But what has happened?”

  “It’s unclear. The police say they found you, drunken and bareheaded in the snow.”

  “And Fräulein Eckstein? How is she?” I said, but before he could answer, I was again fast asleep.

  I was able eventually to awaken and to stay awake, and, when I did, I found Dr. Freud sitting in a rocking chair near my bed, sipping at a cup of tea. My landlady brought in soup for me, and when I’d sufficiently regained my strength, Dr. Freud and I had a frank talk. He’d been none too pleased, he told me, stopping by Fräulein Eckstein’s room the day after I’d last seen him, to discover that Ita was gone. “You really gave no thought at all to my scientific researches, did you, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

  “It’s hardly my fault,” I said. “All I did was to declare my love for Ita and suggest that she depart Fräulein Eckstein through the nose. Everything that came in between those two events transpired without me.”

  “The cause denying responsibility for the effects!” Dr. Freud said sharply. “Well, no matter.” He put down his tea. “Fortunately I’ve managed to gather enough data to rock the very foundations of the scientific world!”

  Before he could do that, however, he’d seen to Fräulein Eckstein’s nose. “It was in a state of ruin,” he whispered. This was partially my fault and partially Ita’s. Mine, because my instructions to her had been imprecise — I should have commanded her to leave, not through the nose, but through the right or left nostril — and Ita’s, because in her recklessness to scale the barricades of Heaven, she’d taken less care than she might have otherwise done.

  As a consequence, the Fräulein’s nose had caved in. Tapping his own nose, Dr. Freud said, “The left middle turbinate bone seemed to have shattered completely.”

  He’d called in Dr. Fliess from Berlin, of course — whether because he thought Dr. Fliess the most competent man available or because working with a doctor from out of town might safeguard his own reputation, I cannot say. Neither can I say whether it was earlier or during these procedures that Dr. Fliess left the meter of surgical gauze inside Fräulein Eckstein’s nasal cavity. My sense of time is woozy, and though I retain no high opinion of Dr. Fliess’s medical finesse, I wouldn’t put it past Dr. Freud to have made up the entire tale, just as many now suspect he made up the story of Bertha Pappenheim’s hysterical pregnancy, just as there are those who believe that Dr. Jung made up the story of Dr. Freud’s love affair with his own sister-in-law. These giants of scientific integrity apparently feel no comparable scruple regarding the truth when it comes to the character of their enemies and former friends.

  Still, true to his word, Dr. Freud wrote up his notes and presented the case as a paper, on April 21, 1896, before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna. He knew the lecture, entitled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” would be revolutionary, presenting, as it did, not only Ita’s case history but Dr. Freud’s radical new theory that the origins of hysteria lay not in early sexual traumas, as he’d until then maintained, but in “dybbuk seductions,” as he termed them, and other forms of spirit possession. As a therapy, Dr. Freud recommended extensive past-life regression by means of a psychoanalysis and, if need be, hypnosis.

  Needless to say, the lecture met with an icy reception, eliciting from Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing the now-famous retort: “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale!” Dr. Freud’s colleagues rose up as a group, not to denounce him, as one might expect, but to protect him from himself, and the talk was universally suppressed.

  Eventually, under pressure from the group, Dr. Freud recanted everything.

  Now, according to Dr. Freud, God was nothing more than a symptom of our child-like longing for a father who might exorcise the terrors of nature, reconcile us to our deaths, and compensate us for our suffering and privation.

  When we spoke of the matter later, he went so far as to claim that I’d hallucinated the entire affair, including our conversations in my bedroom, while I lay, drunken and bareheaded, in the snow — a claim impossible for me to refute. In his memoirs, he distanced himself even further from Fräulein Eckstein’s case: “If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him,” he wrote, “though I may plead that this was at the time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance in order to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties coming to my notice every day. However, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place and were only phantasies which my patient had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon her.”

  As fairy tales go, Dr. Freud’s was neither the sweetest nor the most imaginative, but it served the traditional purpose of fairy tales: lulling its listener into an uncritical sleep.

  I saw little of him after that. Our paths never seemed to cross. I can only assume that the sight of me, loveless and forlorn, waiting for my soulmate to be reborn, reminded him too much of his own intellectual duplicities, or perhaps he merely thought me the most gullible of fools. Whatever the reason, my invit
ations to him were politely, if firmly declined; his and Marty’s ceased coming to me altogether. Thus began the systematic suppression of everything that occurred between Dr. Freud and myself. (Even in Dr. Freud’s famous “Irma” dream, the dream that unlocked the secrets of dream interpretation for him, I appear, concealed, though in plain sight, as a Sammelperson, a composite.)

  BOOK TWO

  MILOJN DA JESOJ;

  or, My New Life in the Esperanto Movement

  CHAPTER 1

  I tried to get on with my life. What else was there for me to do? I threw myself into my work; and when I wasn’t working, I read voluminously; and when I wasn’t reading, I dragged my body out on long walks, dressed head to toe in widower’s black. I wound up most evenings at the Prater, and though I continued to patronize Herr Franz’s Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater, I avoided the prostitutes who hung their wares in the park nearby, fearing that in my misery I lacked the fortitude to resist their squalid charms.

  Inside Herr Franz’s, I found myself ogling every newborn daughter in her pram, hoping to catch in her unfocused eye a glint that might say to me: Yes, Yankl, it is I, your beloved Ita, newly reborn! We’ve only to wait another eighteen years, and we can be married again!

  (The only thing I understood with certainty during this difficult time was that no mother enjoys having her infant daughter stared at in this too-inquisitive way by a stranger in a puppet theater with no children of his own to justify his presence there, and who, really, can blame her?)

  O, IF ONLY I could have ended this book with the scene of Ita dashing headlong onto the ramparts of Heaven from the rumpled sheets of Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital bed! What a glorious drama that would have made! Life, however, does not end where our storybooks do. Or at least mine didn’t. No, the obdurate and all-too-actual world with its crush of petty demands and its dulling routines soon swept me off the high cliffs of my romantic folly, and I was drowned in the wild, raging river of ordinary, everyday life. Though I’d renounced all women in the wake of Ita’s miraculous ascension, and though I intended to keep the pledge I’d made to her — that I would wait for her — the heart is crooked (ah, but who doesn’t know this?) and it wasn’t long before I met another woman.