A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Having slept not at all, he leaned against the window frame. He’d grown so thin that he no longer appeared to have one foot in the grave, but rather one foot out of it, as though, having died some months earlier, he’d remembered his wedding and had somehow managed to break free from his tomb. His arms and legs, thin to begin with, had grown thinner over the course of his engagement, and his brittle bones rattled and clicked as he dressed himself. He pulled up his breeches and belted his gartl and donned, for the first time, his stovepipe hat. Having made the necessary ablutions, having prayed the necessary prayers, he opened the door of his room and found, left there on a table by his mother, a breakfast of extraordinarily weak tea — a fleet trolling of the tea ball through the lukewarm water filled the cup with sufficient caffeine to remove from his truculent bowels the prune-sized turd that had been lodged in them since yesterday morning, causing him almost unendurable intestinal distress — and a bowl of unseasoned groats, softened by sheep’s milk and flavored by three raisins.

  (It’s traditional, of course, to fast on one’s wedding day and although Father would never, for a multitude of reasons, have eaten this meal, Grandmother Sammelsohn had secured a rabbinic dispensation to feed him, to which, for her sake, he complied.)

  Still, as he grasped the tray and teetered precariously over it, struggling to lift it, he couldn’t help regarding it as though it were the last meal of a man condemned to death. He chewed his kasha as gingerly as he could (still his gums bled) and, after two bites, pushed the bowl away. He rose with difficulty and glanced one final time at the ghostly reflection of himself in the mirror, nodding towards it in parting, as though to an old friend he expected never to see again. He took up his hat and placed it on his head, attempting one last time to curl, with his fingers, the lifeless kite tails of his peyos. He gave the sleeves of his caft an a quick and inefficient brushing. Still the dandruff remained. Expelling a final preparatory breath, he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  AS FOR MY mother, she rose that morning from her own bed, all buxom and muscular, and stood with her bare feet planted squarely on the wooden floor. The sunlight streamed through the loose weave of her nightdress, silhouetting the curves of her powerful body. Her golden hair fell about her shoulders like a kilo of challah dough. She poured water from a vessel into a basin, left at sunrise by a servant at her door, and holding her hands before her, intoned the blessing in a voice as deep and as flowing as an ancient river. She splashed water onto her cheeks, already vibrant and red, and looked out the window, at her little town. “Today,” she whispered to herself, “today today today,” the word a tart mint on her tongue, sweet and biting.

  Before she unties the crisscross of laces from her nightdress and opens its collar and pulls the shift over her head (at which point, out of filial restraint, I shall cease imagining her), she records the night’s dream in her dreambook. She writes feverishly, attempting to crack the dream’s bizarre code. She knows, from her beloved Almoli, that no dream is cast in stone (apparently not even a dream image may be graven) and yet the dream had terrified her. No matter how much she attempted to ring the image with an ameliorating hedge of interpretation, it remained as frightening as a snake in a rose garden; and she couldn’t banish from her mind the image of my emaciated father in the costume of a circus strong man lifting her over his head, as though she were a set of barbells, while in a cage nearby, a panther devoured something struggling beneath a dirty bundle of rags.

  FATHER DIDN’T DIE, of course.

  According to my sisters, who loved these stories of our parents’ courtship and who, I realize as I write them down for the first time, may have embellished them to suit the requirements of their girlish imaginations, Father didn’t burn up like a stick of wood in the conflagration of our mother’s nuptial passions. On the contrary, as Grandmother Sammelsohn was happy to remark at breakfast the following day, her son, though still decrepit, appeared unnaturally flesh-colored, heartier and haler than she’d ever seen him. He blushed, pleased. Turning even redder, he laughed off her suggestion. Glancing shyly at our mother, he remarked that he had merely finally gotten a decent night’s sleep, and now it was our mother’s turn to blush. Reaching for the groats, she overturned the pitcher of milk, and my father jumped up, with an unaccustomed alacrity, to call the maid in to tidy up the mess.

  The next morning, he seemed even healthier, younger, less sallow, stronger. The change was obvious enough now that others, not only our grandmother, remarked upon it. Though my imagination stops firmly at the threshold of my parents’ bedroom door, it seems that beneath my mother’s muscular caresses, my father was kneaded, pounded, dandled, coddled, cuddled, cosseted, and suckled back to life. According to my sisters, this resuscitation continued over the seven nights of our parents’ wedding banquet, until on the eighth night — and here I clearly detect the pastel mottling of my sisters’ collective editorializing — it was as though our father had been reborn with a full head of black curly hair, twenty-eight milk-white teeth, virile lips of damask red, alabaster skin, and eyes as blue as an alchemical flame.

  The truth? I can only assume that perhaps Father had had a touch of tuberculosis and that it had clouded his marriage prospects for a time. I suspect further that the picture we have of him as an obscenely wretched invalid has more to do with the exaggerated concerns of his mother — who first told these stories to my sisters — than with his true medical history. Certainly, the joyous life he shared with our mother, with whom no one could help falling in love, brought him a happiness and vitality unknown to him from his dry life as a scholar, bent over his books from morning till night, and I’ve no doubt that his work in the cherry orchards he purchased with her dowry was physically invigorating. Still, how different in every aspect is this love-intoxicated neurasthenic from the reprimanding scold I knew as a child! It’s impossible for me to even reconcile the two. Could this man whom my sisters believed emerged, completely reupholstered, from our mother’s embrace, be the same man I knew, twenty or so years later, as my father?

  The two seemed nothing alike.

  DESPITE HIS STORYBOOK romance, Father wasted no time in arranging mine as a punishment, and the day of my wedding quickly arrived. With a wife and soon, God willing, a family to care for, I would be forced to put aside my revolutionary ideas and return to the quiet ways of our people.

  (In this, however, my father knew me not at all. I was less interested in the overblown political treatises buried in these novels than in the love stories their authors used as a palliative to entice their readers. I was like a child who pretends to be sick for the sugar water the doctor will serve his medicine in. If I could have had the story without the politics, the sugar without the medicine, the honey without the groats, I would have dispensed with them entirely. As far as I knew, however, it was only dashing young freethinkers that beautiful women fell in love with.)

  Not wishing to seem completely old-fashioned, or perhaps even embarrassed by his own methods, Father insisted I meet the girl before the wedding. I was the first of his children to marry, after all, and though this wedding was being inflicted upon me — not as a punishment, not as a punishment, my mother kept reminding me, but as a loving rebuke — still, a wedding is a wedding, and everything must be conducted in an appropriate spirit of joy. One day, I would understand all Father had done on my behalf, and on that day I would thank him. Of this, my mother was certain.

  I would have thanked him then and there, if it wouldn’t have queered the deal. Fearful of that consequence, I kept my mouth shut, or if I opened it, I mentioned neither my gratitude to my father for having arranged this marriage nor for his having prepared me so thoroughly for the wedding night, but only the downtrodden masses, exploited by the landowning aristocracy and my admiration of the Russian narod. If all else failed, a word about Czech independence or the bloody mess in the Balkans, and Father would purse his mouth, his thin lips becoming a lily-white seam inside the opening of his beard — like m
any a saturnine fellow, his renunciative character concealed an emotional disposition — and return to his wedding plans with vindictive furor. Without another word, he canceled the meeting with my fiancée. She was no longer permitted to attend the gathering at our parlor. I alone would be exhibited to her family. They had a right to meet me, after all. In exchange for their generous dowry, they had more or less purchased me.

  WE WAITED FOR the arrival of my future in-laws. Father had insisted I sit, as he had when meeting our mother, in a chair in the parlor with a folio of the Talmud spread across my lap. We heard the rumbling of a coach stopping outside our door. I pretended to concentrate on my Gemara, listening to the trill of my mother’s voice as she welcomed in our guests. Father, pretending to hear nothing, busied himself with papers at his desk. Hands behind his back, he stared at a map of the empire framed upon the wall, and when Mother entered the room with the pantry of visitors behind her — my future father-in-law, my future uncle-in-law, my future brother-in-law — he waited before turning to greet them, pretending to be lost in thought over one of his many business deals, strategizing over his own empire, a miniature Franz Josef, with a look of pleasant surprise on his face.

  “Ah!” he said at last. “I’d lost all track of the time.”

  I unfolded myself from my chair and stood, waiting for the introductions to be made.

  “An industrious boy,” my future father-in-law said, seeing me struggle to get out from under the folio of Talmud. He extended his hand and I offered him my own, a cold dead fish weighing approximately nothing, which is, of course, the appropriate warmth and weight of a scholar’s hand. Then, et cetera, et cetera, the scene plays itself out exactly as you might imagine. While the fathers and uncles chat over cigars, the brother is dispatched to query me, as casually as possible and in such a way that I should be unaware of what he is doing, on the extent of my learning. They’re marrying off their daughter to a budding scholar and want to make sure they’ve gotten their money’s worth. Four years older than I, this brother is something of a dunce and knows a fraction of what I, even with all my heretical afternoons, know, and I make him pay for it, grilling him on this obscure point or that obscure point (many of which I make up out of whole cloth; and so patchy is his knowledge, he fails to detect the ruse), until, humiliated, he excuses himself from my company and, nodding to his father, gives me the familial stamp of approval.

  “Very good, very good,” my future father-in-law intones over elderberry wine. “Everything looks in order. On to the synagogue then, to check on the preparations there.”

  “Is everything satisfactory with your rooms at the inn?” my mother inquires.

  I’ll skip to the wedding itself, already the second in what I’m afraid will be a chronicle choked with weddings. It no doubt frustrated my father that the bride he’d chosen for me as a rebuke was acceptable to me in every way. Perhaps because my heresies had been conducted more or less in secret — I’d felt no need to broadcast my intellectual enlightenment to the world, nor even to our little Szibotya — my reputation was not yet in tatters, and I could attract a decent match, a bright, attractive girl, a healthy girl and one from a good family.

  Hindele was all these things.

  Not yet twelve when I saw her for the first time beneath the wedding canopy, her face behind a lace veil, she possessed, or rather was possessed by, the gawky beauty of a gamboling foal. Wide-shouldered, long of thigh, her head lowered demurely upon her slender neck, she had an awkward, charming grace, and though she only peeked at me, I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

  Her maple-colored hair, in a thick circuit of braids, formed a halo about her head. Her hands were whiter than the lilies she carried. Above a high collar, her chin trembled, and beneath the intricate lace of her shirtfront, her emergent bosom heaved with what I hoped was a nervous delight. What a sight we must have made, I not yet five feet tall, she a head taller, circling me the seven requisite times. In my Saturday best, a round fur hat upon my head, my peyos oiled and gleaming, I was intoxicated by her perfumes.

  I looked at my father, watching the proceedings not a foot away, frowning so severely, the tip of his nose curved nearly to his chin. He looked at me with that same hard glint I would years later see flashing across Dr. Freud’s handsome gaze: that maddening mixture of pride, envy, anguish, revulsion, and despair that marks a father’s love for his son. I knew what he was thinking. He was afraid we were establishing a poor precedent. If a magnificent girl like this is the price one must pay for reading forbidden literature, what prevented the entire world from heading to our gazebo, prying loose its floorboards, unearthing my stash of heretical texts, my Mendelssohn, my Krochmal, and my Luzzato, rolling cigarettes and waiting for the inevitable discovery of their crimes with its swift, sweet punishment, for as my Hindele and I sipped from a single cup of wine, her face so close to mine we were almost kissing, I knew that even the most extraordinary piety would never have earned for me such an exquisite bride.

  CHAPTER 8

  I awoke to the roiling of cathedral bells. I rose from the sofa, where I’d fallen asleep the night before, and pulled back the heavy curtains from the window. The light of a bone-grey sky pierced my eyes. The room was freezing. I wrapped myself in the afghan Aunt Fania had knitted me, and I found my spectacles and sat at my escritoire, with a piece of bread and a little pot of jam, to scribble down my dream.

  I’d dreamt again of the yellow lion. She lay next to me in bed this time, nibbling at my throat; and I awoke, as I always did from these dreams, quaking in fear.

  (I’d discussed the lioness with Dr. Freud. In his opinion, she represented nothing more than a wish to return to childhood. Somehow, he’d gotten it into his head that a porcelain lion had been a favorite toy of mine, although I couldn’t recall ever having possessed such a thing, and nothing I said could dissuade him from his opinion.)

  It was late, I knew. The morning’s newspapers had long been printed and long ago delivered to the kiosks where they were now for sale. Fräulein Eckstein’s advertisement had been waiting for me in one of them, I knew, since dawn. I had no idea how to proceed. I could have asked Otto Meissenblichler for advice, I supposed. As I’ve said, he seemed in possession of a never-emptying Wunderhorn of women. Literary houris, would-be actresses, bored schoolgirls, naughty Hausfraus, widows and virgins alike, seemed eager to immolate themselves upon the altar of his sexual genius. I ruled out knocking at his door, however. The last time I’d done so, I’d barely opened my mouth to call out his name when I’d heard it uttered by voices far sweeter and more plaintive than my own. The door of the bedroom flew open and, though I raised my arms against the sight and commanded myself not to look, no shield could prevent my beholding their four breasts and the two furry pelts that seemed to hang from their waists like scalps on a Red Indian’s belt. The brazen skin of knee cap, hip bone, thigh, elbow, throat, belly, and buttock bruised my optic nerve until it failed and I went blind.

  Besides, what help could Otto give me? We were too different, he and I. He was a voluptuary, a connoisseur of the actual, with no patience for the romantic chimeras that seemed to preoccupy me. While he was being caressed by two or perhaps even four arms, dandled by two or perhaps even four breasts, I was wooing two women, neither of whom was real: Fräulein Eckstein, about whom I knew nothing, and the fantasy of her I’d carried in my heart for the better part of a month.

  Still, I dressed and made my way to the Stadtpark, passing newspaper kiosk after newspaper kiosk, until, finally, I plucked up the courage to buy a copy of the Neue Freie Presse. I sat on a park bench and opened its pages and found within it, exactly as I imagined I would, the advertisement Fräulein Eckstein had placed there for me, surrounded by a black border, a typographical enhancement for which, I assumed, she’d paid extra.

  It read:

  To the kindly oculist who looked into a young girl’s eyes last night — seeing what? I can only imagine: why do you ignore my messages? Meet me, I implore you, at least
once, at the Café Pucher in the Kolhmarkt, noon, for Marillenknödel, today!

  With jittering hands, I drew forth my watch from my vest and saw that it was already noon. I could have kicked myself. My first lover’s assignation and I was already late! I stood and turned in all four directions at once. Dropping the newspaper onto the bench, I flagged down the nearest stroller, an elderly man in a black cloak with the white beard of a biblical prophet, and asked if he knew the shortest route to the Kohlmarkt.

  “The Kohlmarkt?” he said to himself, squinting. “The Kohlmarkt?”

  “Never mind, never mind!” I cried, dashing off. My heart was in my throat. If I were late, I feared the Fräulein might give up hope and leave before I arrived. I had no idea how many of her previous advertisements I’d left unanswered, but surely, after the first few dozen disappointments, one’s expectations, as well as one’s patience, diminish. However, even if I weren’t late, I would have hurried. After all, how often does love summon you by name, or if not by name, by general description?

  This thought produced a terrible fear in me. What if I’d read the wrong advertisement? What if the advertisement I’d read hadn’t been intended for me, but for another one of Vienna’s kindly oculists? After all, the Fräulein hadn’t used my name. On what grounds did I presume I was the kindly oculist in question? Could I even be described as kindly? No, I couldn’t be. When had I demonstrated even an ounce of kindliness towards Fräulein Eckstein (or towards anybody for that matter)? On the contrary, I’d been rude and sullen towards her at Dr. Freud’s. What if I blundered into the Pucher only to discover one of my colleagues there dining on Marillenknödel with the lovely girl he’d met the previous evening, kindly Dr. Kessner, for instance, or kindly Dr. Loiberger, or any of the city’s other oculists, many of whom, far kinder than I, might have made the acquaintance of a young woman who wished to communicate with him through an advertisement in the newspaper? And even if the advertisement had been written by Fräulein Eckstein for me — I was struck by an additional horror — what prevented one of my colleagues from imagining the note had been written for him? Or worse: what prevented all of them from arriving at the café precisely at noon under just such an impression?