A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Certainly, I could have reversed my course and backed silently out of the room, but her beauty arrested me. Not her physical beauty, which, as she was starving like the rest of us, was diminished, but an inner radiance that, despite our terrible circumstances, she yet possessed, and that reminded me not a little of my sisters. Perhaps hunger had robbed me of the ability to act quickly. Whatever the reasons, I found myself paralyzed, standing in place in the doorway, staring at the picture she made — a sorrowful girl with the rain-soaked light coloring her face — not a thought moving in my brain, until at last she had no choice but to turn and greet me.

  “So sorry,” I stammered, pulled out from my famished daze. “But I’m afraid I … didn’t see you there.”

  She nodded sympathetically, as though what I had said made sense. Her face was red and blotchy from crying, and she pushed her tears away with the heel of her hand.

  “Are you all right, fraylin?” I took a step towards her. “You haven’t been crying, have you?”

  “No,” she said, although this assertion, so transparently false, only made her cry more. We were forbidden from touching each other by the rules governing this rabbinic household, and it was all I could do not to reach out to her and enfold her in my arms, so that she might give unchecked expression to her grief. I offered her my handkerchief instead. As she reached for it gratefully, however, our hands brushed, and I felt that oddly shocking, illicit electricity of sexual contact, made even more delicious by the stricter rules of the household forbidding it. It was all I could do not to kiss her hand or press my cheek against it, wetting it with my own tears. Ignoring our touch, she dried her eyes with the rag I’d presented to her and said, “It’s all so very sad, isn’t it, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

  I nodded, standing as near to her as propriety allowed. She folded her arms and, with her chin trembling, gazed at the ceiling rafters. “Oh, how I wish you could have been here when my mother was alive.” She looked at the floor and shook her head. “All the cooking and the baking and the feasting! You wouldn’t believe it now, Doctor, but this kitchen was always filled with clouds of steam and, oh, all sorts of delicious vapors. A never-ending banquet! How I used to love to walk by and stick my head in and hear the oil sizzling and the dumplings boiling. The smells would wake me in the morning sometimes, and it was all I could do to finish dressing before dashing down to help. One of the cooks was sweet on me, and she’d give me a little taste of whatever it was she was preparing, before assigning me a chore.” She laughed a small laugh. “Visitors and relatives and servants everywhere, the clatter of silverware, of drawers opening, of rolling pins pounding, I can’t tell you! The men praying and singing with my father, the women cooking and talking and laughing. It was a proper court then, with music and dancing and …” Her breast lifted and fell heavily. “You could feel the presence of God here. But now?” She gave out a shrug. “Now I don’t know.”

  She dropped her head and smiled at something. “Shall I tell you a secret?” she said.

  “If you wish, fraylin.”

  “When I was a little girl, I believed that nothing made God happier than His frequent visits to our house.” She closed her eyes. Two tears slid down her cheeks. “Oh, who knows anything anymore?”

  “Things will return to how they once were,” I said. What else could I say?

  “You’re a sweet liar.”

  “Still, we must hold on.” I attempted to remove all playfulness from my voice. She was still holding my handkerchief, and she looked at it as though noticing it for the first time.

  “And now” — she pulled the handkerchief through one hand — “it’s all I can do to scrounge up a cup of tea for our good doctor, who brings so much joy to our good father’s life.”

  “On the contrary, fraylin, it’s he who has done much for me,” I said, although, in fact, I could think of nothing at all the rebbe had done on my behalf.

  “He cherishes his Sunday mornings with you, you know. You’ve been so like a son to him.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “A son nearly fourteen years his senior!” I exclaimed with a sense of theatrical heartiness.

  “No!” she cried. “You don’t look it at all.” And she hit me playfully on the arm with my handkerchief.

  “Now, fraylin, it’s you who are so very sweetly lying.”

  “No, but really, you’re … I don’t know … quite boyish. And besides, what does it matter how old a man is when he’s as …”

  But here, she stopped herself. I’m not certain which one of us dropped his gaze first, I only know that soon we were both looking at the floor.

  “Here. Let me have your cup, and I’ll brew up what little tea we have and bring it in to both you and my father.”

  I surrendered the teacup and, as I did so, she pressed my hand gently but firmly inside her own. The embrace was tender and warm and — unless I’m a terrible judge of such things — not a little erotic.

  CHAPTER 5

  We existed in a kind of traumatized dream-state. The thin membrane between sanity and madness seemed to have ruptured, and if you described your day to someone outside the ghetto, he’d no doubt assume you were recounting a dream: The sidewalks were littered with corpses, it was wintertime, I was starving, and the government had forced everyone to turn in their fur coats. We knew from the broadcasts we tuned in to over our contraband radios — by “we,” I mean the ever-changing group of refugees who slept on top of one another inside the Zamenhofs’ apartment — that there was no stopping the Germans as they marched across Europe, flattening everything in their path. Liberation was another dream, and every hour took its toll. Almost every day now, I saw at least two or three people dropping dead in the street, often helped along into the next world by the Jewish police, who had traded their wooden-tipped shoes for rubber-toed boots, the better to splinter our bones, without risking theirs, whenever they kicked us. I have to say: they were the worst among us. Each had been charged with a daily quota of deportees, and if they failed to round up the requisite number, members of their own families made up the shortfall. Perhaps this goes a long way in explaining their brutality. In matters of life and death, a certain shortsightedness is to be expected, I suppose, and every hour, though it be one’s last, counts. Still, we were all marked for death, the Jewish policemen included, and everyone knew it.

  The deportation center, the Umschlagplatz, was directly behind the Zamenhofs’ old house, and in the twilight sometimes, when I imagined no one could see me, I’d make my way to the roof and look down into its hellish precincts. It was there that the truckloads of captives were taken for deportation, men, women, children, escorted in under armed Ukrainian guard.

  Even from the heights of the rooftop, I couldn’t block out their screams. The entrance was like the maw of some mythological beast whose hunger could not be satisfied. You could buy your way out with only a hundred złotys, but only the rich could afford that, and with prices going up every day, it was only a matter of time before they took their place in line as well.

  There were doctors working in the Umschlagplatz. I could see their white smocks moving among the prisoners in the twilight from my roof. They were part of the ruse, it seemed, employed by the enemy as a way of keeping order. (Certainly, you’d tell yourself, if the authorities have gone to the trouble of hiring a doctor to put a plaster on my foot, which the Ukrainian or the Lithuanian or the Latvian guard has broken, these same authorities can’t be sending me to my death now. It didn’t add up.)

  I tried not to think about it, and I attempted, as well as I could, to avoid being swept up in one of the Jewish policemen’s raids, an easy enough task on the days I wore my smuggler’s uniform — thanks to my fluency in German, I’d been impressed into service by the underground — however, on days when I appeared in the streets only as myself, my fate was as insecure as anyone’s. And naturally, when the German captain let himself into Dr. Zamenhof’s consultancy and asked for me b
y name, I assumed I’d been betrayed, my smuggling exposed by someone who knew me.

  As with so much else in my life, however, I was wrong.

  “HERR DOKTOR SAMMELSOHN?”

  “Ja, bitte?” I said, not daring to look him in the face.

  “Herr Doktor Jakob Josef Sammelsohn?”

  “Ja, ja,” I said.

  “You’re Herr Doktor Jakob Josef Sammelsohn?”

  “I am,” I said, although at that moment my greatest wish was not to be.

  “Well,” he muttered, as though disappointed to have found me, “come along.” When I didn’t obey him immediately, he raised his voice and said, “Get your coat and come along, Doctor. That’s all now. Please.”

  “But my patients,” I said, grasping at straws. When I turned towards my lone patient, who a moment before had been sitting in the waiting room, I found that he had fled. Perhaps he’d never been there to begin with. Food, as I’ve said, was scarce, and though I continued to smuggle it in, I shared it with as many people as I could, principally the children living in the Zamenhofs’ house. I could barely remember the last time I’d eaten a full meal, and thanks to the starvation with which I lived, it was impossible at times to tell what was truly happening. My mind seemed to drift constantly. Still, this captain seemed real enough, and I did as he commanded me, putting on my coat and making my way towards the door. Glancing over my shoulder, I glimpsed the patient who had disappeared standing now in the darkness of the back room. He nodded at me, his face a picture of forlorn encouragement. I was clearly doomed, and we both knew it. I wasn’t even a Pole, but a former Austrian living illegally in Warsaw and a Jew.

  (Although the Germans had nullified my passport, I wasn’t exactly a man without a country. I had a country. It merely happened to be an imaginary one. For two thousand years, my people had lived in the Land of Zion as though it were real; and although this is perhaps not the place to say it, now that it’s real, I regret that we too often treat it as though it were imaginary.)

  “Don’t forget your hat, Herr Doktor,” the captain said, taking my elbow and steering me out the door. On the street, he added: “You should lock up, don’t you think? To discourage vandals,” he explained.

  Ah, that’s how it is with Germans, I thought. They think nothing of killing a man, but every door must be locked and every window bolted. I banished this thought from my mind, however. There was no profit in feeling superior to a man who, literally or figuratively, has a gun pointed at one’s back.

  “Down this street,” the captain said, a step behind me. Though I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face, I was exquisitely aware of his presence — the thudding of his boots, the rasping of his breath — and I trembled each time he touched my elbow to steer me this way or that. Against his solid hand, I was embarrassed to feel my own insubstantial trembling.

  “Only a little farther, Herr Doktor.”

  “And where, may I ask, is the good captain taking me?”

  “Never mind. Never you mind that.” He spat.

  I considered pestering him with questions in order to make his job as unpleasant as possible, but found I lacked the spirit for the game. Besides, it was impossible to awaken a conscience in an enemy without one. I looked at the sky above the rows of tired old houses, at the midwinter sun struggling up behind them. I tried to remain philosophical: all the attention I’d lavished upon my life, all the care I’d taken with its every detail, and this is where it had gotten me.

  Hadn’t I had enough of these old hurts, these old wounds, and all the comical feints they’d inspired? Perhaps Ita had been right all along, perhaps it was better to jump into the next life, as into a pool of water, and emerge from the other side, newly reborn. (If, on the other hand, as we’d seen with Ita, one merely enters one’s new life with a new iteration of one’s old problems, surrounded by reincarnated versions of the people one once knew, there seemed little point in dying.)

  “Up these stairs, Herr Doktor. Careful now. There’s a tricky step.” I considered running for it, but being shot in the street at that moment seemed less preferable than being shot in an interrogation room twenty minutes later. “In here, in here,” he said, pushing me through the door of an apartment. “Sit!” he barked, and I sat. He walked past me and, as he did, he lifted my hat from my head and dropped it onto my lap. Grinning obscenely, he rapped with his knuckles against an interior door.

  “Fine, fine,” a voice answered him from within.

  For the first time, I felt free to study my captor. A typical specimen, I thought, barrel-chested with powerful shoulders. On closer inspection, he appeared slightly stooped, as though the effort of standing erect was costing him dearly. His face was wide and jowly. There was something almost feral about him. He seemed a wild, ferocious dog.

  Having received his answer at the door, he took a seat behind me — I could hear the legs of his chair creaking beneath his weight — and I imagined that would be the last I’d see of him.

  Soon, I thought, he’ll put a bullet through my head.

  THE DOOR OPENED, and a second man entered the room. “Ah!” he said, seeing the two of us together. “Excellent work, brother.”

  I must say: this fellow couldn’t have been more different from the first. Trim and dignified, he wore a precise little beard on the point of his chin. It was silver, as was his elegant pompadour. His black vest was still unbuttoned and he was busily rolling down his shirtsleeves. He looked as if he’d just finished his morning shave. “So you’ve managed to find our good doctor, have you? Marvelous! No, no, Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t get up, don’t get up!” he said, extending his hand and moving towards my chair. “You haven’t changed a bit. Has he, brother? Not a bit. Ah, but it’s extraordinary to see you again!”

  It’s extraordinary to see me again? Did I know these men? I looked about the apartment, at the table and the sofa, at the antique lamp glowing on the desk. None of it seemed familiar. I peered into the face of the man standing before me. He smiled expectantly, his eyes gleaming behind a thick pair of black-rimmed glasses. His lower teeth were crooked, and this gave his chin an asymmetrical, though not an unattractive cast.

  “Ha! He’s amazed!” the captain chortled behind me.

  “Astonished is more like it,” the other fellow said, peering diagnostically into my eyes.

  “It never fails!”

  “It never does, does it?”

  “I … I’m sorry,” I stammered, “but I don’t recall our ever having met.”

  “He doesn’t recall our ever having met!” The captain hawked up a vulgar laugh. The other fellow shook his head and tutted his tongue.

  “They tend to forget,” he said.

  “Human beings, he means,” the captain whispered in my ear.

  “They forget that they’ve forgotten.

  “And then that is forgotten as well.”

  I’m hallucinating from hunger, was my next thought.

  “Possibly,” the man in the vest agreed, although I was certain I hadn’t spoken these words aloud. Or perhaps they’ve already murdered me, I thought.

  “No, I can assure you that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Yet?” I said.

  And with that, he began to laugh, and his companion, the hulking dog-man standing behind me, began to laugh as well, and that glorious sound, a sound I remembered having heard only once before — at the side of Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital bed — filled the dingy little apartment until I couldn’t keep from giggling myself. “I’m not hallucinating, then?” I said.

  “Oh, well, no, we never said you weren’t! There are many avenues into the true world, Dr. Sammelsohn, and hallucination has a long and noble tradition.”

  “More reliable than dreams,” growled.

  “On the contrary, don’t believe him, Dr. Sammelsohn. His is the minority opinion.”

  “But it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s he who hasn’t kept up with the literature.”

  braised with a searing scowl. “Mu
st you contradict everything I say?”

  “I don’t contradict everything you say. However, in this case, Dr. Sammelsohn, he’s incorrect, and the scholarly conclusions are mixed.”

  The two angels glared at each other with such ferocity that I feared they’d come to blows, but then they began to laugh again, and I couldn’t help laughing as well, and once again, that delicious golden sound filled the room. My shoulders relaxed, my belly unknotted, and tears began streaming down my face.

  HELD OUT a starched kerchief. “Aw, here you go, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

  “Thank you.” I said, and drying my tears, I apologized for my weeping.

  “Oh, no, no, tush, tush! Don’t be silly,” said.

  “We sympathize completely,” said. “The passage of time” — he made a small rolling gesture with his hand — “the sense of loss.”

  “Not to mention,” nodded towards the window, “these deplorable conditions.”

  My brain was on fire. I seemed to have only the slightest idea of what was taking place before me. My medical training, as well as the time I’d spent with Dr. Freud, made me believe, as I told myself it was reasonable to believe, that I’d undergone a psychic fracturing of some kind. Confronted with the brutality I was doubtlessly at that moment experiencing at the hands of my torturers or fearing I would in the next moment experience, my mind had retreated into a world of fantasy where sense could seem to be made of it all. Still, amazed to hear myself, I next said, — but why on earth are you here?”