Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  Nina said, “I have been generous with my father. His true motivations are even more venal than I’ve said. Although he would never admit it, what my father wants more than anything is to have a family connection to the Baron Móric E.”

  “Surely your father knows that the baron is now a good Christian Magyar and associates little with the Jewish members of his family.”

  “Never underestimate my father, Dr. Zobel. For all you know he means Ignác and me to convert for the sake of resuming relations with the noble branch. He has already talked of changing our name.”

  The S. surname, like many of those of our people, gives away its religion in its first Galician syllable. My own name, Germanic in origin, though we too hail from Galicia, does the same. Even in those most egalitarian of days, before the Great War, when the discriminations of our current less-fortunate times were nearly unimaginable, there were professions in our great Magyar nation in which it was difficult to progress with a name like Zobel or S., and were I not a member of a profession that boasted such a large percentage (well over forty!) of Israelite practitioners, perhaps even I might have succumbed to the temptation to change my name.

  If we members of the Mosaic tribe hope to be regarded as completely equal, we must not differ in any detail from the other subjects of the Crown of Saint Stephen. Details like dress and language can seem trivial, but they can serve to isolate us from our surrounding communities. Witness, for example, the lot of the Jews of Galicia from whom many of us are descended. Though none of us can deny that anti-Semitism exists here in Hungary, especially in the wake of the Jewish purges and the recently passed numerus clausus restricting Jewish enrollment in universities to 5 percent, still it is a far cry from the pogroms experienced by our ancestors and even currently by our cousins in eastern Europe. This difference exists because most of us have altered our attire, our conversation, indeed many aspects of our way of life, in order to fit into this society that has welcomed us so well. Hungarian liberals and anti-Semites alike might routinely complain that Budapest is too Jewish, that the press and the bourse are under our control, that Hungarian literature is being “Judaicized.” Still, even in the current climate we are secure here in Hungary, not least because of our assimilation.

  To Nina I said, “Many Jewish families have of late changed their names. Not all of those have done so as a prelude to conversion. And come to that, many fine and upstanding Jews have found it suits their lives and ambitions to convert.” My own sister Sarolta had recently been baptized into the Catholic Church at the insistence of her children, though their reasons for abandoning the faith of our fathers was problematic at best. My niece and nephews are as nasty a bunch of social climbers as you’ll ever meet.

  Nina said, “Dr. Zobel, are you a reader of Women and Society?”

  “The feminist periodical? I have perused it on occasion. The elder of my sisters is a subscriber. You would like Jolán, Nina. She is a professional woman. A teacher of mathematics. I think you’d find her interesting.”

  Unlike my younger sister Sarolta, who married before her eighteenth birthday, Jolán never attracted the attentions of any man, or at least not one whom she could tolerate the idea of marrying. “It’s different for a man,” she would say when I would remonstrate with her on what I considered at the time to be an excessive selectivity. “If you choose unwisely, at worst you’ll have to spend an hour or two of every day gazing across the dinner table at your bad decision. A woman who makes the same mistake spends the rest of her life scrubbing the stains from the underdrawers of someone she despises.”

  “Good Lord, Jolán!” our mother had cried. “Your mouth. Your terrible, terrible mouth!”

  “Not to mention the fact that it’s hardly you who’ll be scrubbing anyone’s underdrawers,” I said. “You’ll surely employ a washerwoman.”

  “I am speaking figuratively,” Jolán said. “I will neither literally nor figuratively scrub the underdrawers of someone whom I do not love.”

  As blessed as she is with intellect and wit, Jolán possesses features as severe as her tongue and was not, in the end, obliged to reject the advances of many suitors, let alone ascertain the state of their undergarments. Instead, she pursued to the extent possible a career as a mathematician, though as a woman her opportunities were limited. When no Hungarian faculty would enroll her, she went to Germany to study at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen with a female mathematician named Emmy Noether. Eventually, frustrated in her desire to complete her doctorate by the Institute’s limitations on female students, Jolán returned to Budapest and became a lecturer in mathematics at a women’s teachers’ seminary.

  “I’d like to meet your sister,” Nina said. “Other than my professors at the gymnasium, I don’t know many women professionals. Only the ones I’ve met through outings of the Feminist Association.”

  “I shall arrange it, then. Perhaps we can revivify your fondness for dobos torte with more agreeable company.”

  “Perhaps, though I fear the pastry is lost to me forever. But I ask you about the magazine because in a recent issue they published an article about marriage. The author was unnamed—she said only that she was a feminist woman. She wrote about the hypocrisy of using the word ‘love’ to describe contemporary marriage. She pointed out that marriage isn’t about love. It is an economic transaction. The bride’s family chooses a groom of suitable financial status and then pays him to take their daughter.”

  As a father about to embark on the negotiation of his daughter’s marriage, so crass a description of the process made me uncomfortable. Thankfully, I was practiced in the analyst’s art of neutrality of demeanor and Nina did not notice my discomposure.

  “Do you know, Dr. Zobel, what my dowry is to be?”

  “How could I?”

  “It’s probably like your own daughter’s.”

  “Doubtless much more.” A mere physician cannot, of course, provide what a lion of the bourse can.

  “One hundred thousand kronen. My husband will claim one hundred thousand kronen, and then he will be expected to provide me with a three-thousand-kronen monthly allowance.”

  I was aghast at the figure, an order of magnitude greater than what I had determined to offer Erzsébet’s suitor. Did I need to reevaluate? I wondered. Was I being naïve and unduly parsimonious? Would the figure I had decided on be enough?

  Nina continued, “And then, of course, there is my trousseau.”

  The word in her mouth was a profanity.

  “Do you know that in addition to my linens and clothing I come complete with the furnishings of a four-room flat? Every cupboard, every washbowl chest, every bedstead and upholstered settee.”

  Good God, I thought. If I was to protect the contents of my bank account, I must hope that this magnanimity was unique to Nina’s family and not a reflection of the expectations of the young men of the community as a whole.

  “Every aspect of my dowry and my trousseau is considered part of a transaction, Dr. Zobel. If I die without a live born child within six years, my family will reclaim the amount in full. If I die after six years but before nine, again without children, they will receive two-thirds. And so on.”

  “Dear Nina, nowadays dowry is much less formal and prescribed than it once was. It is more a way for the bride’s family to assist the young couple in maintaining and furnishing their home than a strict accounting.”

  “The author of the article said that it is a farce to consider this kind of transaction anything but economic. True marriage can only happen between two economically independent people. The ideal marriage is free of pecuniary interests and is about nothing but pure love.”

  “This ideal you describe sounds very wonderful in the abstract, but how is a woman to be financially independent? Surely that is nothing more than a fantasy.”

  “When I have my medical diploma I will be able to earn my own independent living. And then I will be able to choose to marry a man whom I love. If I marry, it will be based on love
. Not money. Love!”

  By now Nina’s face was as red as the beets in my mother’s—may her memory be for a blessing—Sunday borscht. Sweat poured from her brow and she was breathless.

  It was time to calm her agitated nerves. “Let us return to our free association,” I said. “The next word is ‘banana.’ ”

  “ ‘Banana’?”

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘Banana’?”

  “Yes, Nina. ‘Banana.’ ”

  “Yellow.”

  “Train.”

  “Travel.”

  “Suitcase.”

  “Travel.”

  “Monocle.”

  “Dr. Zobel and his wandering eye.” She clasped her hand over her mouth. “Oh dear, Dr. Zobel. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s nothing, my dear. You are engaging in the process just as it was meant to be practiced.”

  We proceeded with free association, and though it helped to ease Nina’s nervous excitement, I cannot say that either of us garnered any new insights from the process. The intuitive leaps that can sometimes lead to new and deeper understanding on the part of both the analyst and analysand were missing from this session. I determined at that point that if I were to make progress with this young patient, I would need to turn to other methods, including dream analysis. As she was gathering her things and preparing to leave my consulting room, I asked her to keep a small notebook by the side of her bed to jot down her dreams.

  “You must write them down immediately, before you rise from your bed. Otherwise, they will be lost to memory.”

  Nina seemed eager to explore this analytic form, and we closed our interview with both of us very much looking forward to what we might learn together at the next one.

  • 34 •

  OVER THE NEXT MONTH, Nina and I continued our analysis, much of it consumed with discussions of a persistent dream. In the dream, which occurred nearly every night for three weeks, Nina rushed through the Budapest East Railway Station, arriving at her platform only to find that the train had departed without her. Though she initially could not remember where the train was going, when pressed she thought perhaps Vienna. Together we discussed the possibility that the dream of missing the train signified her anxiety about missing an important opportunity in her life. Medical school, she insisted, and reminded me that both her uncle and I had attended medical school in Vienna. I told her that in dream analysis the most obvious interpretation is not necessarily the correct one, and sometimes it is even the opposite of the obvious that is true. It’s well known that train travel, especially through tunnels, symbolizes sexual intercourse. It was my view that the missing of the train by Nina’s dream self expressed her fear of missing out not on a profession but on a normal sexual life, on marriage and children. She resisted this interpretation, though we discussed it for many days. She even came to one appointment clutching a copy of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a book with which I am, of course, intimately familiar, as I have worked for many years on a translation of the seminal volume into Hungarian. I undertook this task at the urging and under the leadership of Dr. Sándor Ferenczi himself, in celebration of the formation of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. Though work on the translation has gone more slowly than I or my mentor had anticipated, I expect to be finished sometime in the not-too-distant future.

  Nina showed me a passage she had underlined. “Dr. Freud writes that departing on a journey is one of the best authenticated symbols of death,” she said. “So missing the train might simply be my mind soothing me by reassuring me that I won’t die.”

  “While I agree that dreams of missed trains might in some instances be consolation for the fear of death, I am not confident that such is the case for your dream. Do you think very much about death, Nina?”

  “No. Hardly at all. Does any nineteen-year-old who isn’t sick or in the army think of death?”

  “Some do. There are even some children who fear death.”

  “Of course I fear death, who wouldn’t? But I don’t worry about death. There’s a difference.”

  “Indeed,” I said, wondering, not for the first time, if there was anything wrong with my young patient beyond a difficult relationship with her father.

  I was reassured about the purpose of our treatment days later, however, when her menses arrived, and she experienced even more painful cramping than usual. I was able to alleviate her agony to a small extent with light abdominal massage and with warm compresses, concurrent with the suggestion that the pains were psychogenic. The moderate success of this therapy increased my confidence that the root of the pains lay in contiguous trauma, and in that session and later ones I encouraged Nina to sift through her memories in search of the instigating moment.

  She recalled her first menstrual period in great detail, and though initially I had hopes of locating the trauma in that first experience, it seemed to have passed relatively easily. Her mother had prepared her for it with admirable straightforwardness and tact, and Nina remembered little if any anxiety connected with the anticipation of the experience and no fear with the arrival of the blood. On the contrary, she remembered eagerly anticipating her “womanhood.” The only element of surprise was at the intensity of the pain. Her mother had told her to expect cramping and had instructed the maid to refresh her hot-water bottle frequently through the first few nights of her period, but apparently the severity of Nina’s pain took them all by surprise. Though our first discussions failed to yield an insight and thus a complete alleviation of her symptoms, I remained confident that with further analysis we would arrive together at the trauma at the root of her ovarian neuralgia.

  In the month of June, nearly a week passed without us meeting, a lag I prefer to avoid. It is the very intensity of the doctor-patient relationship that lends analysis its particular utility. But unfortunately Nina gave me no choice in the matter. From the fifteenth through the twenty-first, the International Woman Suffrage Congress met in Budapest, and Nina was utterly consumed with the congress’s goings-on. Her friend Miss Gizella Weisz, the diminutive secretary to Rózsa Schwimmer, had arranged for her to be made a page at the congress. Nina took her tasks very seriously and absented herself from my care for the full duration.

  I would not have seen her at all during this time, except that I found myself curious about the congress. Mere members of the public were not invited to observe the congressional meetings, and none of the ancillary lectures interested me overmuch, but I did go down one afternoon to the congress headquarters simply to take in the sight of the world’s largest gathering of suffragists and feminists. I was hardly alone in my curiosity. It seemed the entire city had assembled in the square, even the mayor himself was there, glad-handing suffragists and their opponents alike. I was surprised and gratified by the diversity of women attendees. There were many examples of my sister’s type, women of the bourgeoisie whose moderate prosperity allowed them the liberty and position from which to agitate for rights their poorer sisters hadn’t the time nor inclination to demand. But there were also groups of working women, seamstresses and factory workers, even agricultural workers, the very women who I had imagined would have been both ignorant of and too busy for such assemblies. There were even peasant women from the Hungarian countryside and from other parts of Europe’s hinterlands attired in brightly colored, handwoven, and embroidered traditional garb.

  I had nearly given up hope of finding my young patient amidst the hordes of reveling feminists, when I noticed a group of young ladies dressed in white gowns, their chests festooned with purple sashes. Each girl held in her hands a nine-foot pole, at the top of which fluttered banners with the names of different languages. Clutching the sign DEUTSCH, with the seriousness of a general’s standard-bearer, was my Nina. She stood proud and tall, her pretty face wreathed in smiles. As I made my way through the crowd, I saw a stout elderly woman approach her. Nina bent over, nodding vigorously, and then scanned the crowd. Her eyes lit on one of the Boy Scouts who had been recruit
ed to act as guides for the congress members. She motioned him over and transferred the old woman to his care. Her role, she explained when I reached her side, was to provide help to any German-speaking delegates who might need assistance or directions.

  I said, “I imagine that so many women speak the language that you are run off your feet.”

  She laughed. “Not at all. I mean, yes, yes, I am working very hard. But it’s wonderful. You’d never believe who I’ve met, Dr. Zobel!”

  She proceeded to enumerate a long list of Teutonic ladies, none of whom I’d ever heard of but all of whom were “very important” to the cause of universal suffrage. In the previous forty-eight hours, all the greatest female minds of the German-speaking world had apparently asked Nina’s help in finding the toilet.

  “And the lectures, Herr Doctor!” She moaned, near rhapsodic. “I have learned more in the past days than in all my life until now.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. Did you know that one of the first female physicians was a woman named Agnodike in ancient Greece? She practiced gynecology and obstetrics in Athens, at a time when it was forbidden for women to practice medicine at all.”

  “I had not heard of her.”

  “It’s true! Oh, one moment!”

  “Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?” she said, turning in response to a small hand laid on her arm. But it was not in fact a lady in need of Hilfe. Her interrogator was none other than Miss Gizella Weisz, the tiny creature who had arranged for Nina’s employment at the congress. Nina bent to kiss her friend’s cheek and then, clutching her hand, turned to me.

  “Dr. Zobel, let me introduce Miss Gizella Weisz, my friend. And more important, private secretary to Mrs. Schwimmer herself!”

  “Ah, that great lady,” I said, my tone teasing. It is not that I didn’t admire Mrs. Schwimmer. She was held in general high regard in those days before her devotion to the cause of radical pacifism became widely known, before she was forced to leave Hungary for Vienna and ultimately, as I understand it, the United States. I teased Nina and her diminutive friend because their admiration of Mrs. Schwimmer reminded me of my sister’s. So devoted as to be nearly hagiographic.