A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “Please!” the woman to my right exclaimed, and the fellow on my left shushed me as well. In reaction to the commotion brewing up behind him, Fräulein Eckstein’s brother angled away from the noise. (Yes, this splendid fellow turned out to be not Fräulein Eckstein’s lover, but her brother Friedrich, a noted Sanskritist and yogi: hence the impossibly rigid spine.) His movement left me an avenue, an opening, if I leaned forward enough, through which I could address Fräulein Eckstein privately, or at least away from the man and the woman on either side of me, which is what I did.

  “Fräulein Eckstein!”

  “Dr. Sammelsohn?” she said at last, turning towards me and peering behind her in the gloom.

  “What a marvelous coincidence!” I boomed out in a whispered charade of confidence. “I sat here at random — completely at random! — with no forethought, with no design at all, absolutely randomly, and yet, well, here you are!”

  “Yes, and it’s good to see you.” She smiled apologetically, a small, though not unkindly dismissal, before returning her attention to the stage.

  “Yes,” I said, attempting to prolong our conversation but without success.

  Her brother lowered his head towards hers, and the two murmured conspiratorially. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but assumed he was asking her to identify me. What could she tell him? Who was I to her? No one, really, just a man who seemed continually on the point of raping her, that’s all. Friedrich Eckstein turned his head and, with one handsome eye, took me in. I nodded curtly, as though we’d been introduced as rivals.

  Without answering my nod, he brought his attention back to the first violinist, who had taken his chair, garlanded by a wreath of applause. I could feel the man and the woman on either side of me regretting my presence between them. I crossed my arms and legs, hoping to disappear into myself. However, I could barely concentrate on the concert. The first violinist began with an aggressive attack, and the opening phrases, punctuated by silence, sliced the air like a series of sinister accusations. After an achingly beautiful motif, one hectoring note was shrilled out incessantly, until the piece sounded like a jig being danced by a man with a bullet in his brain. None of it made any sense to me.

  “Bitte,” I said, standing in a crouch.

  “What now?” the woman on my right whispered explosively.

  “Pardon me, excuse me, pardon,” I said, moving down the row, knocking into knees at every chair, anger and pique washing over me from the four quarters of the concert hall. A scowl of annoyance burned into my back from the violist, peering over his music stand into the darkened hall, doing everything he could, short of leaving off from the music, to see what the commotion was.

  I retrieved my coat and pushed through the front doorway and was once again on the street.

  I WALKED UNTIL I reached the Prater. Its woods were dark. Women’s voices called out to me from every direction beneath the trees. These were no sylvan nymphs, but prostitutes, and I wanted nothing to do with them. Or rather, wanting everything to do with them, I avoided them completely. Returning night after night to the grove where they lingered, lit by the garish lights of the amusement arcades, I could bring myself to approach not one of their number. And yet, for the better part of a fortnight, I ended my evenings here. Where else was I to go? Dr. Freud had seen to it that I was accepted nowhere. When I dropped in on Dr. Rosenberg or on Dr. Rie or — why not mend fences? — on the Freuds themselves, the maid returned my card to me exactly as I’d placed it on the silver tray, as though it were too revolting to be touched.

  I continued to see my patients during the day, but I no longer cared about catching them in their fakery. I prescribed government-issued spectacles for anyone with sufficient nerve to bluff through the exam. Let them have their imperial stipend! What did I care? After the night of the Grosse Fugue, as I came to think of it, I avoided all lectures, concerts, and plays. If, by chance, I had seated myself behind Fräulein Eckstein in a large concert hall, did I imagine I could drift through Vienna’s other public venues without encountering at least one person who, poisoned by Dr. Freud, would cut me dead? I had neither the heart nor the head for such encounters, and instead I found myself in the late afternoons wandering through the Prater, waiting for the sun to set and for the fallen women to appear like overripened fruit beneath the trees, where the courage to purchase one reliably failed me.

  I began attending a children’s puppet theater in the park. Usually the only adult in attendance without a child in tow, I sat on the low bench, my hands laced around my knees, taking up as little space as I could. Without a child, I felt I had no right to more room. I felt like a clumsy giant sitting on the miniature bench, nodding and smiling with an exaggerated benevolence, in the hopes of reassuring the others — women, mostly: mothers and nannies — that I was as harmless as I seemed. (These many years later, I can only imagine that they saw me for what I was: a lonesome boy of a man lost in the capital city.)

  Herr Franz’s Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater was no more than a wooden room, really. Its walls, once painted gaudily, were faded and stained. It was heated by a brazier of coals burning in the rear. Yellow tufts of winter grass not beaten down entirely by the feet of stamping children grew between the benches. The stage was a crude rectangle cut into the back wall. The curtains looked like old chintz drapes onto which were sewn moons and stars. A bracing wind might collapse the entire ramshackle structure in an instant, it seemed, and yet, when the barn door closed behind us and the stage lights ignited and the hurdy-gurdy began its warbling, I lost all sense of myself. Finally, in the darkened playhouse, I could breathe again. As the puppets strutted and fretted behind the proscenium, barking their dialogue out in comical dialects, I followed the story, whatever it was — tales from the Arabian Nights, from the Brothers Grimm, from the Ramayana — with incommensurable delight.

  (Oh, the place was extraordinary. The puppet master Franz, a Jew from Galicia like myself, prided himself on a Life and Death of Beethoven performed each December in commemoration of the composer’s birth, and it was here that I witnessed, over the course of a single night from dusk to dawn, Goethe’s Faust, performed in its entirety.)

  At times, I found myself envying the puppets, and not only for their lightness and agility. Though their limbs were wooden and their bodies fashioned from the flimsiest of fabrics, each was animated by a defining spirit, each exulted in his own character, reveling in it, as it were, no matter how many flaws it contained. It was exactly the opposite of real life: the sillier the puppet, the more trouble he brewed, the more joy he created, and the more beloved he became. No one asks a puppet to reform his character or to improve it through psychoanalysis, and though he may find himself a social outcast in the middle of the play, by its end, all will be right with him again, though he will have, in the meantime, learned nothing at all.

  Sitting among the children, I reimagined my debacle with Dr. Freud as though it were being performed by marionettes. Half-daydreaming, I watched a marionette version of myself on the little stage falling in love with a marionette modeled on Fräulein Eckstein. From the breast pocket of Otto Meissenblichler’s suit, too large for my wooden frame, occasionally bursts a velvet heart fastened to my chest by a spring. The stage is a reproduction of the Carl in precise trompe l’oeil. With a herky-jerky gait, tangling up in my strings, my enormous papier-mâché head filled with dreams, I rush down the stairs of the theater, searching for the beautiful marionette in her lavender dress, only to encounter a sinister Dr. Freud, smoking at the bar. O, what a villain is he! O, how easily one can recognize his villainy when he has been transformed into a puppet! Why, just look at that pointy beard and those glinting eyes and the Mephistophelean cigar and the red devil’s tail that continually escapes from a patch in the back of his pants with a loud spronggg! As a puppet, I’m as oblivious to his devilry as I was as a man in actual life. However, the delight my obliviousness creates in the audience of screaming children is a comfort to me.

&n
bsp; “Would you like to come play cards at my house on Saturday night, eh?” Dr. Freud asks, and through a mechanism only Herr Franz understands, smoke actually comes out of his painted mouth.

  “No! No! Don’t do it!” the children scream from their benches, all mad limbs and terrified shrieks.

  “Don’t do it, children? Is that what you’re saying?” I bounce lightly on my wooden knees, the string that lifts my hand lifts it to my head, and I scratch it in confusion.

  “Yessss!” the children scream.

  “Yes?” I feign bewilderment. “Yes or no? Which is it now?”

  “Yes!”

  “All right then, ‘yes’ it is.” I turn back to Dr. Freud. “Why, I’d be delighted, simply honored, thoroughly and extraordinarily so, to come.”

  “Then I’ll see you at eight. Sharp!” He leers, smoke steaming out his ears.

  “At eight,” I say, floating offstage. “At last my loneliness is over!”

  The stage reddens with a hellish glow. Bobbing wickedly at the end of his web of strings, Dr. Freud confronts the audience of booing children. “You almost gave me away there, Kinderlach. But thankfully, Dr. Sammelsohn is as thick as the wood from which he’s cut. Now, all I have to do is introduce him to Fräulein Eckstein, and his heart, that shabby pillow he keeps hidden behind his breast pocket, will be broken into a thousand pieces!” He laughs a devilish laugh: “Maw-haw-haw-haw-haw!” His strings slacken, and he bows evilly.

  The children hiss and hoot.

  (It’s foolish, I know, to assume I’d be the central character in this comedy. Devil or saint, as far as history is concerned, Dr. Freud is always the star. And where do I imagine I’ll end up, except as a tangled heap of string and fabric, moldering in the puppet trunk of history?)

  CHAPTER 13

  Dr. Freud had been emphatic that he never wished to see me again. He couldn’t have made his desire less ambiguous had he nailed it, as a proclamation, onto the doors of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and so I was very much surprised, late one evening in March, as I was leaving the clinic, to receive a telephone call from him, requesting that I come immediately to his home.

  “Or I can come round to get you, whichever is the quicker.”

  “No, I’ll come to you,” I said, still, after everything, deferential. However one might characterize the various stages of our acquaintance (surely not now as a friendship), he was always its senior partner.

  “Take a fiacre, and I’ll pay for it. And have the driver wait for us both outside.”

  I gathered up my medical bag and locked the examination room and bundled into my coat. I made my way to the street, where, after a short while, I was able to flag down a cab. Dr. Freud’s home was near the clinic, and while I rode, I barely had time to think through this extraordinary development. Why, hardly a month ago, I’d been exiled by Dr. Freud, as though by the tsar, to the northernmost reaches of a social Siberia, and yet here I was, roused from the dead and summoned urgently back. Had my case been reviewed? Had I been found innocent of all charges? Or had Dr. Freud, digging through my file, merely discovered a new crime with which to charge me? I had little time to agonize over these concerns. I knew only that my throat was dry in anticipation. I asked the driver to wait at the curb, and I made my way into Berggasse 19. I had barely knocked at number 6, when Dr. Freud was at the door.

  “Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, you’ve arrived.”

  Forgive me, reader, if I belabor these five words: Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, you’ve arrived. For the life of me, I couldn’t mock out their deeper meaning. Was Dr. Freud glad to see me? Did he, in uttering them, mean to express, Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, thank goodness, you’ve arrived? Or did something of his previous vexation darken their intent: Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, so here you are again, turned up like a bad penny? His Tarock face gave nothing away, and I didn’t know whether to throw myself upon his bosom, the prodigal son returned, or to remain distant, braced for further scolding. Also what matchingly bland phrase could I utter in return to cover the entire spectrum of his possible meanings?

  “Yes, I’ve come,” I said, keeping well away from him on the landing.

  “There’s so much you didn’t tell me.”

  He turned to lock the door of his apartment. I stuck my hands into my coat pockets, where they might at least jangle my keys.

  “I suppose I might have left out a bit of the sexual parts, it’s true …”

  “A bit?”

  “Rather all of the sexual parts.”

  “I’d suspected as much,” he said, dropping his keys into his own pocket. “And though you may feel the penitent’s need to unburden his breast, I assure you I’ve no confessor’s wish to hear the illicit details, and happily, except perhaps tangentially, your malfeasance in the case of Fräulein Eckstein is not at issue here.”

  He took my arm and escorted me down the staircase. Once again, I was hard-pressed to interpret the gesture: was he holding me, as one might a beloved friend, or as a jailor would a fugitive who could suddenly bolt? In either case, I felt constrained.

  “On the contrary,” Dr. Freud murmured, “I’m speaking of your wife.”

  “Of Hindele?”

  “Rather of Ita.” He purred the name into my ear, and my entire being went cold. In truth, I almost fainted. Indeed, had he not been holding my arm, I’m certain I would have tumbled onto the cobbles of the sidewalk. This was a name Dr. Freud and I had never spoken between us.

  “Of Ita?” I repeated. I searched his face for clues.

  “Let us get into the fiacre, Yankl, where we can talk more intimately.”

  How many thoughts can aggravate a man’s brain at once? A hundred, two hundred, a thousand, more? At that moment, of those thousand buzzing, humming, blundering thoughts, I was aware of only one: a desire to break from Dr. Freud and to run as far from him as I could. Unschooled in blatant arrogance, alas, I’d made a habit of ignoring my inner wishes or, more precisely, of concealing them inside a pantomime of decorum. I could no more act upon my desires with immediacy than I could break into a yodel in the middle of the Heldenplatz. Further: Dr. Freud’s will was suppler than my own. Whereas another man might have bridled at his ambush with a stern counterattack — As soon as you explain to me what this is all about, my dear fellow, then I’ll happily accompany you — or resisted him with more force and still been justified — Kindly put it in a letter to my solicitor — even had these replies occurred to me then, and not, as they did, long afterwards, I would have lacked the courage to utter them. As you wish is all it occurred to me to say.

  “As you wish,” I did in fact say, as Dr. Freud opened the door of the fiacre and, extending his arm, made certain I climbed in before him.

  (It occurred to me to climb immediately out the other door and to sprint away, but to commit such an act, I’d have to have been a puppet in a commedia, and not a flesh and blood man in the farce he was making of his own life. And though I knew the chase would have delighted an audience of children, I also knew that the inexorable laws of drama would have demanded my capture, as apparently did the laws of God Himself.)

  I leaned back against the seat and threw aside the woolen blanket, waiting for my nemesis to clamber in. Dr. Freud bellowed up an address to the driver and shut and locked the door. We sat side by side, he taking up more room than I, his elbow pinioning my arm against the seat. Perhaps the cocaine had anaesthetized his senses. In any case, he seemed unaware of the pressure he was exerting upon my arm.

  The sun had set, and the lamplighters were about their sooty business. A freezing drizzle had crept in. The city was dismal and gloomy. There were few others on the streets, and the lonesome clip-clop of our horses’ hooves resounding against the buildings chilled my bones.

  Dr. Freud sighed and looked out the window on my side of the carriage. “You never told me about Ita,” he said, glancing past me through the sleet-spotted glass.

  “Has someone contacted you?”

  I wouldn’t have put it past her grandfather to have tracked me d
own in order to blackmail me by revealing everything to my new important friends. Of course, unless Zusha the Amalekite were a devotee of obscure neurological journals, he’d have never heard of Sigmund Freud. In any case, my fears were unfounded. Zusha, as I recall, was illiterate, in German as well as in the seventy other languages of the world.

  “I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” I told Dr. Freud.

  “Nor have you reason to be.”

  “However, I was a child.”

  “As we all were once.”

  “Not yet thirteen.”

  “At sixteen, Alexander had conquered the world.”

  Gaslight from a streetlamp, as we passed it, fell across Dr. Freud’s brow. He squinted, momentarily blinded, before returning his gaze to me. “I’m afraid I’ll need to know everything. If you care at all for Fräulein Eckstein, Dr. Sammelsohn, your help will be essential because, frankly, I’m in over my head.”

  “But what has Ita got to do with all of this?”

  “That will be made clear, my dear boy, but later, when we have the leisure to go into the thing in depth. First, I’ll need to know from you, honestly and without expurgation, all that occurred between you and the girl.”

  “Between Fräulein Eckstein and myself?”

  He shook his head. “Between you and this Ita.”

  “But Ita has nothing to do with Fräulein Eckstein or her hysteria, I assure you!”

  Dr. Freud scowled from behind his whiskers.

  “I promise you, Dr. Sammelsohn, all will be rendered clear. But a good deal of that clarity depends upon a frank and forthright confession from yourself.”