“You killed me, Yankl!”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate, Fräulein Eckstein.”
“You killed me!”
“And also please consider my neighbors, many of whom have to get up for work early in the morning.”
With her bloody palms lifted to the ceiling, she stood on her knees. “How could you have killed me when I loved you so? I loved you so much, Yankl. My sweet Yankele.”
I hardly knew the woman, and she knew me not at all. I’d been infatuated, it’s true, off my head with dreams of her, but even as foolish a fellow as I would not confuse an attraction of that sort with the kind of love that kills.
“Fräulein,” I said, “it’s true I’ve allowed myself to become overly fond of you in recent days …”
She shrieked again. Still on her knees, she closed her eyes and dropped her head back. Her bared throat angled towards the ceiling, she cried out in extreme pain. She looked as though she were being whipped across her back, lashed with a strop wielded by the hand of an unseen tormentor. At intervals, she gasped, her chest buckling forward, her head thrown farther back, her face ecstatic with pain. Her hands were balled into fists. With each lunge forward, she dug her nails deeper into the meat of her palms, until they too were bleeding.
“Ah! … ah! … n’ah!” she cried. “God is merciful, Yankl! God is merciful, yes! Even when we spit in His face, even when He must rebuke us!”
She opened an eye and looked at me with a small sad smile: the very portrait of a loving penitent, though nude.
I stood at the door, my nightclothes in a bundle before my sex. I counted thirty-two invisible lashes until her rhythmic bucking came to an end.
“Oh, yes! yes!” she cried. “Oh, but do you see God’s extraordinary mercy, my lover, my husband, my slayer?”
Finally she collapsed, falling sideways onto the bed.
(Today, of course, I would assume that in an hysterical frenzy of sexual excitation Fräulein Eckstein had brought herself to a climax, perversely enjoying my voyeuristic participation in her guilt-ridden self-degradation. Ignorant then of such things, I had no way of interpreting the gruesome masque she’d played out before me. All I knew, all I told myself, was that the hypodermic I’d given her seemed to have finally worked.)
I checked her pulse. It was dangerously faint. I covered her where she lay, not daring to move her, lest I awaken her again. I put on my clothes. Unable to find a fiacre at that hour, I ran all the way to Berggasse, bisecting the Ring, and by the time I got to number 19, dawn had announced its presence in the sky.
“Dr. Freud! Dr. Freud!” I shouted, following his sister-in-law in her nightclothes to their kitchen where I found Dr. Freud at his morning table. He looked up from his porridge and his Kaiser roll and took in what I’m certain was the ghastly sight of me, standing before him, unshaven, my hair wild and uncombed, my hands and face smeared with blood where, distracted in my haste, I’d neglected to wash them.
“It’s Fräulein Eckstein,” I cried.
“Emma?” he said, standing.
“You must come immediately!”
CHAPTER 12
Along with throat catarrh and his heart troubles, Dr. Freud suffered from boils that made his every move a torment. Especially painful was a boil at the base of his scrotum, which, he told me, had lately grown as large as an apple. It was my misfortune to have bounded into his kitchen, my face and hands smeared with Fräulein Eckstein’s blood, on the day he’d scheduled to have it lanced. Minna, serving him his breakfast, promised to ring the doctor and, if possible, to remake his appointment for later in the day.
“Thank you, my dearest,” he said, rising from his place with a great show of pain. Wincing, he gathered up his things and, in a moment of pique, ground his cigar into his uneaten porridge.
“I’ll hurry back and make sure she’s still all right, then,” I said.
“Still?” He glowered. “What makes you think she was all right to begin with?”
Moving gingerly, his legs slightly bowed, he grimaced again, and before I could answer him, he barked out, “Yes, yes, go on then, go!”
A half hour later, he was making his way painfully up the stairs of my apartment, a damp handkerchief pressed against his nose. “The suppuration is intolerable this morning,” he explained.
I leaned over the railing and called down to him, “This way.”
“I’m ascending as quickly as I can, Dr. Sammelsohn! Do not hector me!” He hesitated at each landing, puffing like a grampus. “Is there a spittoon anywhere on the premises?”
“None on the landing, I’m afraid.”
He hawked up a viscid oyster of phlegm and spat it into an umbrella stand in the corner.
“Pity,” he said.
A disgusted exhalation slipped through my lips before I could censor it. Dr. Freud eyed me coldly. “The body has its needs, Dr. Sammelsohn. Now, show me to my patient, and while I see to her, perhaps you will be so good as to rinse her blood from your face and hands, so that you cease to resemble a Red Indian on the war path!”
He limped into my rooms. Taking a deep breath and surmounting his disgust, he entered my bed chamber. I called to him from the kitchen, where I stood at the sink, “I assure you, Dr. Freud, I had no intention of ever seeing the Fräulein again, exactly as I pledged to you.”
I tamped my face with a towel. Through the bedroom door, I could see him examining Fräulein Eckstein, checking her pulse, her arm lifted awkwardly behind her back. She had fallen forward onto the bed, and I’d thought it best to leave her undisturbed when I’d fled the apartment in a panic. I explained as much to Dr. Freud.
“Dr. Sammelsohn, if you would, please help me turn her over.” He was bitingly polite, and I felt appropriately bitten.
In concert, we each took one of her shoulders and lifted her up, placing her on her back. Her unbuttoned chemise exposed the length of her body: her breasts, her belly, her knee caps all lacquered and shiny with blood.
At that moment, Dr. Freud ceased being able to look at me. “Call an ambulance” was all he said, staring at his shoes.
“It looks terrible, I know,” I said — and it did: the bed splashed with blood; the room, a shambles — “but she came here on her own. You have to believe that. She was sleepwalking, in fact.”
“The ambulance, Dr. Sammelsohn. I’ll take the particulars of the case from you later. At our leisure. Once the patient has been seen to.”
“Of course.”
Chastened, I went to find the porter. Before I left the apartment, I turned to watch as Dr. Freud buttoned Fräulein Eckstein’s chemise with all the tenderness of a father. He’d neglected to remove his hat and was wearing it cocked onto the back of his head. “What has he done to you, my poor child?” he said, though she’d not yet awakened from the chloral I’d given her.
THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED, and the attendants bundled Fräulein Eckstein out, still unconscious, on a bier.
Dr. Freud turned on me quite suddenly. “You!” he said.
“Yes?” I asked meekly.
“Have you any coffee by any chance?”
“I’ll set about brewing it at once.”
Wincing, Dr. Freud sat down at my kitchen table.
“An unfortunate morning,” he muttered, rubbing his face in his hands. He inspected the length of his beard, lifting it with one hand and letting it fall, his face a growl of self-disgust. In addition to the surgery for his boil, I’d kept him from his daily appointment with his barber. “Even my teeth feel gritty,” he complained.
“Milk?” I asked, handing him a cup.
“Black.”
“Black it is.”
“Indeed.”
Refusing to acknowledge the little laugh I’d presented to him in appreciation of his joke, he nailed me to the cross of my own guilty feelings with a dour stare. Sitting across from him, I turned my cup around and around on its saucer, waiting for him to speak.
“Can you please stop that incessant clattering!” He closed his
eyes and brought his hand to the middle of his brow. “I have such a headache.”
I released the cup.
He took his pulse. “I want a cigar. And I need more cocaine.”
Dr. Freud treated the mild cardiac arrhythmia from which, during the time I knew him, he imagined he was dying, with unstinting, self-administered doses of cocaine. (If not the actual cause of his arrhythmia, the cocaine must surely have exacerbated it.) He painted his nostrils repeatedly until copious amounts of pus were discharged, after which he imagined he felt better. Now he blew his nose into his already saturated handkerchief. Attempting to wipe it clean, he daubed with the kerchief at the embouchure of his beard, spackling it further.
“Dr. Sammelsohn, if you would be so kind, rehearse for me the events leading to your appearance this morning at my breakfast table. And leave nothing out,” he warned, “as it shall be I and not you who decides which details are of importance and which not.”
He pierced me again with that terrible gaze of his. More than Fräulein Eckstein’s health, I realized, hung in the balance between us. Though I’d come to think of my longing for her as a month’s folly, never to be reciprocated, the friendship with Dr. Freud that resulted from it was of great value to me. At the moment, however, that friendship seemed as precarious as Fräulein Eckstein’s health. One ill-chosen word, I knew, and it would be lost forever and, through it, my citizenship in the brave new world I’d come to think of, prematurely, as my own. How much could I tell Dr. Freud without risking everything? In a moment of myopic, if not blind panic, I decided to leave out all the sexual details in order, I told myself, to spare Fräulein Eckstein and to guard her honor. Plus, what possible interest could Dr. Freud have in that aspect of things? (At that point, I knew nothing of his then-revolutionary interest in the psychodynamics of sexuality.) My hands fidgeted and ceased fidgeting with my coffee cup, and I poured forth the story as I thought he wanted to hear it, eliding over all self-incriminating details in the hopes of proving myself worthy of his continued esteem, meanwhile emphasizing my passivity in the whole bloody show: I’d been up late, reading Fliess, I emphasized for good measure, lost in my own thoughts, when Fräulein Eckstein knocked upon my door. Sleepwalking, she’d come to my apartment barefoot, without a wrap, in a state of dangerous psychosis. When she began screaming, I gave her a hypodermic of chloral to help her sleep the few hours until morning, placing her in my bed. All was well, until her nose began to bleed, and she began screaming, accusing me of having murdered her. Under the circumstances, had I really done anything he himself wouldn’t have done, either as a doctor or a man?
With each and every word, however, I sensed I was only alienating Dr. Freud’s affections further. Had I made an open and frank confession, revealing everything to him, including the small licentious particulars I’d edited out, the consequences couldn’t have been worse nor the retribution harsher.
“You’re lying!” he nearly shouted at me.
“Certainly not!”
“Then you’re leaving something out.”
“Of course, but nothing of consequence.”
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
“What do you imagine” — I coughed out a hollow laugh — “that I raped the poor girl in her sleep?”
“So that’s it, then!”
“No!”
“Ach, this fucking boil!” he cried, adjusting his pants crotch and wincing again in pain. “Listen to me, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said, “I cautioned you, did I not, to stay well away from the Fräulein, and so you pledged to me that you would, but in your lust — and I do not use the term lightly — you failed to live up to that pledge, and now you have not only betrayed me, as a physician, as a colleague, as a friend, but you have perhaps done irrevocable harm to a young woman whose health is at this very moment dangerously compromised. Why, the Ecksteins are longtime family friends of ours! Did you think nothing of that? What am I to tell her mother?”
“I have no idea.”
“You have no idea?”
I didn’t know how seriously to take his question. He seemed to be simply throwing my words back at me, though I wasn’t certain. Therefore, I shook my head and shrugged. “I really have no idea,” I said again.
“Very well, then,” he said, standing. “In that case, Dr. Sammelsohn, I regret to inform you that our acquaintanceship has reached its terminus. Make no effort to contact me either personally or professionally, as I assure you I will make no such effort, from my corner, to contact you. I expect you to have nothing further to do with the patient, even in the aftermath of her recovery, the prospects of which you have, I reiterate, severely compromised. Have I made myself clear?”
He didn’t leave me a moment to reply.
“Then I shall take my leave of you.”
“You’re going?” I said, only now beginning to comprehend all that he had told me.
“I am, sir,” he said. “Good morning and good-bye!”
MY DAYS AND nights were suddenly quite empty, emptier in fact than they’d seemed before I met Dr. Freud, when solitude was merely an unalterable condition of my life and not the result of my own wicked behavior. Before, I might have been content to eat a cold chicken wing at my desk while perusing a medical journal, followed by an early bed. Now, however, I couldn’t tolerate being alone in my apartment. I made plans for every evening — concerts, lectures, operas, plays — though I could hardly afford to do so, and this met with disaster as well.
Let me explain: I was mad for the late quartets, that last flowering of Beethoven’s difficult genius, and I had read in the papers that the Ehrstinsky Quartet were scheduled to perform the Grosse Fugue, op. 133. Rarely played, the piece is abstruse, perhaps even demented. I had read the score, but could make neither head nor tail of it, and was very much looking forward to the concert. I hesitated over purchasing my ticket out of fear of running into Drs. Rosenberg or Rie, certain each would have heard about my falling out with Dr. Freud or, if he hadn’t, would embarrass me by asking friendly questions about this or that event to which I knew I would never be invited. I was concerned, also, that if by chance I encountered Fräulein Eckstein in the presence of these men, they might, with unintended or even purposeful malice, let Dr. Freud know that I had seen her. Though I told myself I had nothing to be ashamed about, I felt ashamed about everything. It was better to suffer in private, I knew; still, I couldn’t abide the solitude of my apartments.
I arrived late to the Brahms-Saal of the Musikverein and surrendered my coat to the girl at the coat check. I stood in the back of the auditorium and calculated my odds: What were the chances, given her illness, that Fräulein Eckstein would even be here? And if she were, how likely was it that I might run into her? To further decrease the chances of our meeting, I forbade myself to look about the hall. I descended the aisle instead with my eyes cast down so that all I could see were the feet of the patrons seated on either side of the passage, having removed my eyeglasses as an additional precaution. Right or left? I asked myself, coming to a row that appeared in my blurred view to contain at least one vacant chair. My natural inclination was towards the left, and I disobeyed it, hoping, in breaking all habit, to further diminish the likelihood of encountering anyone I knew. I pushed my way to an empty chair and sat. I reached into my pocket for my pince-nez, which I fastened to the bridge of my nose, only to discover that I had placed myself directly behind Fräulein Eckstein. (Had this coincidence not happened personally to me, I would never have believed it possible!) My stomach sank. I inspected the room, but even with my pince-nez on, I could find no available seat nearby. I consoled myself with a single idea: Surely Fräulein Eckstein will not turn around? She was too well bred a girl for that.
She was wearing a dress similar to the one she had on that night at the Carl, and in what I considered too flirtatious a manner, bubbling over with whispers and giggles, she periodically leaned her shoulder into the shoulder of her companion, a gentleman whose most remarkable characteristic,
from my vantage point at least, was his abnormally rigid spine. I sat up straighter, I couldn’t help myself, and peered over their shoulders. They weren’t holding hands; however, when making a point, Fräulein Eckstein not infrequently permitted herself to touch this fellow’s hand, resting, as it was, on top of his knobby-headed cane.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered to myself. Where is Dr. Freud, and why isn’t he here to witness this? I wondered. What good does his forbidding me to see Fräulein Eckstein do if the taboo doesn’t extend to all of masculine Vienna?
I was a man of science, trained to observe the most horrific of scenes while remaining inwardly calm. Compared to the gruesome demonstrations I’d been forced to watch in the course of my medical training — vivisections and such — how difficult would it be, I put the question to myself, to observe Fräulein Eckstein in the company of this other man? Perhaps the experience might even prove instructive. I might come to understand what my attraction to the Fräulein had been about. Almost immediately, however, the task proved beyond my meager strength. Though the last thing I wanted was to be glimpsed by Fräulein Eckstein or caught, having seemingly followed her to the concert, at the same time I couldn’t abide being ignored by her!
The quartet mounted the stage, and the first violinist, his hair hanging down on either side of his forehead, began explaining the difficult piece, apologizing for it, really, while praising our willingness to hear all of the Master’s work, no matter the costs to our senses. The comment elicited appreciative laughter. As it died away, I leaned forward and, hoping to invest the phrase with a credulous tone of surprise, muttered, “Oh — well — hello!” as casually as I could.
Neither Fräulein Eckstein nor her companion gave any indication that they had heard me. The people on either side of me took note, however, each presenting me with an arch glance before shifting away from me in their seats. Whether Fräulein Eckstein heard me or not wasn’t simply an academic question. If she hadn’t, I could repeat myself verbatim, with a little more volume this time; but if she had, no matter how genuinely I sounded my surprise, I would appear ridiculous. How many times may one be astonished by the same coincidence? (Not more than once, of course, is the answer.) Nevertheless, I decided to risk everything and repeated “Oh — well — hello!” at a louder pitch.
A Curable Romantic Page 14
