A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “A confession?”

  “That is perhaps an ill-chosen word.”

  “I’ve committed no crime.”

  “I didn’t mean it in its juridical sense.”

  “I’ve done nothing with which to reproach myself. Neither with Fräulein Eckstein nor with Ita!”

  “Ah.” Dr. Freud dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his eyes with the meat of his palms until the gesture produced a small clicking sound. “The treacherous byways of the unseen world have perhaps put me into too ecclesiastical a mood. If so, forgive me.” Lifting his head, he cast his now red-rimmed eyes over me. His voice creaked with emotion. “Dr. Sammelsohn, I don’t by any means pretend to understand the entirety of human consciousness. In this regard, I’m very like one of those ancient cartographers who limned, with their gouaches and their oils, the boundaries of the then-known world. Though skilled sufficiently in their arts to encompass the globe, their work depended fundamentally upon the reports they received from men who set out to explore those regions, and whose work, in turn, depended upon the whim of this or that monarch or, later, upon the heads of some shipping or trading firm, who, in the first case, lusting for gold or spice, and in the second, for navigable trade routes, desired accurate maps to enable them to return to the new lands they’d conquered. In our young science, the cartography of the human psyche depends equally upon many such serendipities: the caprices of the maladies that afflict our patients; the caprices of the patients themselves, who may or may not seek treatment or who may or may not seek treatment from me; even then, what a patient chooses to reveal about herself in analysis depends upon a thousand and one incalculable factors, not excluding which tie or cologne I happen to be wearing that day and what memories these bring to mind. In this way, I’m not unlike Anaximander or Mercator or Americus Vesputius, those mapmakers who, for their work, relied upon the integrity and the veracity and the mathematical precision of their informants, most of which, one can only presume, were lacking. And just as these ancient cartographers might, at the limits of their knowledge, spell out the legend Beware! Beyond this border: demons!, so too the ancient psychologist, the priests and abbots of their day, faced with the vexing hysterias and neuroses of their parishioners, and the wild behaviors these diseases occasioned, imagined in them the thing they feared the most: demonical possession. Let me be blunt, Dr. Sammelsohn, there is no difference in outward appearance between a case of severe hysteria and one of demonical possession. But I confess to you, at the risk of sounding like a lunatic myself, that although I know Fräulein Eckstein is suffering from the former, from all appearances, she seems to be in the grips of the latter.”

  “You’re claiming — what?” I stammered. “That you believe — that is to say — that you imagine Fräulein Eckstein is possessed by a demon?”

  “By a spirit of some kind; a dybbuk, let’s call it; more specifically, by your wife. It’s not my claim — I would never make such a preposterous claim — but hers. That is to say: your wife’s.”

  “Ita’s?”

  “Ah, yes, that’s right,” Dr. Freud purred. “I keep forgetting. Concerning wives, you’ve had more than your fair share.”

  “There’s no need to bait me,” I said, bristling. “There’s nothing one can do to change one’s past.”

  “Perhaps you should tell that to your wife, Dr. Sammelsohn, as she seems to be laboring under an entirely different opinion regarding the matter.”

  “You speak of her as though you’ve recently seen her.”

  “In many ways, I feel as though I have.”

  Suddenly, Dr. Freud threw back his head.

  “Ah! this damnable nose!” he cried.

  Blindly unbuttoning his coat, he pulled aside its tails and searched in his trouser pocket for a handkerchief, which he brought to his dripping nostrils. “A moment and the suppuration will cease. You can use the time to tell me everything you need to. And leave nothing out! One never knows which detail might be the picklock to open any number of barred doors.”

  The fiacre rocked from side to side, the horses’ hooves clopping out a snow-muffled tattoo. The sleet had stopped, but the night air was thick. I pulled the collars of my overcoat together with one hand. The mention of Ita’s name had evoked in me a chilly fear. I leaned my head against the seat cushion and peered out the window at the sky. The moon was bleaching the clouds that covered it. There was nothing to do, I supposed, except to tell Dr. Freud everything, the truth, the same and simple truth I’d been avoiding mentioning to him or to anyone, for that matter, since I’d arrived in Vienna.

  AS THE EMERGING moon cast everything in ivory tones, I painted for Dr. Freud a picture of myself as a child, a skinny youth with earlocks and a long caftan, a child so thin he barely fit into his clothes. My marriage to Hindele was proving a disaster. To begin with, at the age of thirteen, I had no idea what one did with a wife. As I’ve said, Father’s instructions to me in this regard had been cryptic at best, and though, at night, in the tiny bedroom we shared, the sight of Hindele’s maple-colored hair, unfettered from the prison of her marriage wig, was sufficient to arouse my manhood into a painful tumescence, as far as I knew there was no remedy for the distress her beauty provoked in me. Even the books my father had confiscated, though considered depraved, were of no help to me in this regard. Indeed, one could learn nothing from such books! Their authors, men of the world presumably addressing other men of the world, felt no need to follow their protagonists into the bedroom, or if into the bedroom, into their beds, or if into the barn, into the haystack. Though corrupters of youth and despoilers of our heritage, these authors preferred to drop a curtain between the reader and such goings-on, not only, I presumed, because such goings-on were known, at least in their general contours, to the reading public but also because publishing one’s description of such goings-on was no doubt a chargeable offense.

  Something happened to the lovers in these books, between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, but I had no idea what. All I knew was that a fervent discussion of politics and religion seemed to lead up to it. As a consequence, Hindele and I never touched. We lay in bed each night like two adolescent sisters, talking, as did the lovers in these books, about a better world and the mad revolution that would soon bring it into being. Along with the books, which Avrum continued in secret to supply me, I’d taught Hindele to smoke, and though we shared cigarette after clandestine cigarette (by the time we were divorced, she had developed quite a habit), and though she had a real head for philosophy and quickly fell under the sway of these very same books, the entire thing led to nothing more intimate between us than talk.

  “Of course, we must free our own people from the tyranny of their superstitions!” she said one night as we lay chastely side by side. Propped up on one elbow, she allowed her hand to strum the covers. “The Czechs, the Magyars, everyone is ready to throw off the emperor’s yoke, but even if we were free of imperial oppression, we’d still be slaves to an invisible God, which is far worse than a master of flesh and blood whom one can kill. Or don’t you think so, Yankl?”

  “Ssh,” I cautioned her. “Or Father will hear you.”

  Though the house was large, its walls were thin, and especially if one wished to, one could easily hear everything that went on in the other rooms.

  “Let him hear me, that pious old fraud” — after only half a dozen novels, Hindele had mastered the dialectic — “clinging to his antiquated ways, parroting the language of rabbinic oppression!”

  I can’t tell you how fetching she was in her transparent shift, pacing like a revolutionary in his garret, her cheeks in a high ruby blush.

  “And not even real Hebrew, Yankl, but all those horrible quotations from the holy books.”

  I encouraged her, hoping to enrage her, to ignite her passions, as happened all the time with the cardboard characters in the novels we shared. What wouldn’t I say to keep her fury aroused? It was like feeding logs into an already blazing oven, although
to what purpose, I had no idea.

  “Where and to whom shall he ever speak such a language?”

  “Nowhere and to no one.”

  “In Palestine? Is that what he thinks?”

  “Who goes there, anyway, but old people to die?”

  “Our home is here, Yankl! Not in some imaginary dream world! Some land that even the Arabs don’t want! Why, just look at my own father.”

  “Remind me again what it is you so despise about him, Hindele.”

  “I don’t despise him. On the contrary, I love him, Yankl, and so I pity him. My pity for him — and, oh God, for my mother! — is the greatest proof of my love. Why, when I look at him, scurrying around, afraid of his own shadow, doing anything the rebbe tells him, I cry for our people, Yankl, I do!”

  She’d become a wild river of a girl, and with snatches of the Song of Songs and the Mishnas and Gemaras Father had taught me concerning a husband’s obligation to his wife roiling through my head, I had no idea how to stay afloat inside her passions. Younger than I, more fiery by nature, Hindele possessed the idealism of a twelve-year-old, which is precisely what she was. Her firebrand politics, her desire to ring down the hypocritical banners beneath which our families lived, were sincere, and they had transformed her. But with me, it was the opposite. I’d grown resigned, as Father predicted I would, to the life he’d set before me. I divided my days between learning the family business and learning the sacred law. I’d even advanced in my studies. My progress as a scholar increased in tandem with my growing unbelief. When I was a little boy, I believed everything I was told, that God Himself had authored the Torah, designing the letters down to the little crowns they wore upon their heads. It was enough for me to open a book and to gaze at the letters to feel the presence of the Holy One. What was there to understand? Now that I no longer believed that God had written the Torah, what it said had actually begun to interest me.

  Still, Hindele would have none of it. She chafed under the rigorous strictures of our life. An eighth daughter to my mother, she was expected to cook and clean and was treated no differently from the rest. Secretly, she wanted to go to school, to study properly, to travel, to become a teacher or — God willing! — a revolutionary.

  I can only wonder what life would be like for me now if we had remained married, if she hadn’t objected to a meaningless remark Father made over the soup that terrible evening in coldest December. Both of our families were there. The Shabbos candles gleamed on the sideboard, bathing the room in a warm, tranquil light. Along one side of the table sat my sisters, all in a row, their hair freshly washed and plaited. My mother sat at the foot of the table, her blonde wig piled up muscularly upon her head. She was still a handsome woman. Near her was my mother-in-law, her many chins resting contentedly one on top of the other, and a string of pearls, lit by the candlelight, glimmered in the crevice of her bosom. Hindele’s father, Reb Nuftile, sat near Father, the great mink wheel of his shtreimel resting on his head like the halo of a Christian saint. Next to me sat Hindele, of course, and on either side of us her siblings. Father conducted the business of the meal with a quiet dignity, unable to conceal his pride and his pleasure. Everything had turned out as he planned, I recall thinking. My rebellion had been quelled. I had been repatriated to my native land, against which I had momentarily considered treason. All had been forgiven, and if now and then I indulged in the seditious literature that had marked my villainy, I did so only as a personal lark or a childish foible and not as a revolutionary act.

  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief and even offered up a silent prayer of thanks. Indeed, I was so lost in these happy thoughts that I failed to notice the commotion that had stirred up at the table until it was more or less fully launched. Hindele and my father were speaking to each other in tones that, because each was trying to hold back his passion, sounded all the more passionate and severe.

  Of course, Hindele respected the writings of the Sages, she announced, but as a source of interesting intellectual activity, pertinent perhaps in its own time, just as the thoughts of liberal rabbis and political reformers of our own age were pertinent to ours. “Consider the way we behave in our own houses of worship,” she said. Loud, boisterous, incessantly shuffling. “Couldn’t we take a page from our Christian neighbors who sit in their churches without saying a word, without moving a limb? And if you object” — as she knew my father would — “that we mustn’t walk in the ways of the Gentiles” — he’d know the quotation: Leviticus 18:3 — “then why, when King Solomon enjoins us to learn from the ant” — Proverbs 6:6 — “and Job from the beasts of the fields” — Job 12:7–8 — “can we not learn from our neighbors who, unlike these lower forms of beings, are men of reason, like ourselves?”

  Before either of our fathers could object, Hindele continued, her cheeks flashing an exalted crimson. “Why, if even Rabbenu Tam” — And what did she know of Rabbenu Tam? Nothing. She’d merely memorized Liebermann’s famous essay — “says we should envy the nations of the world who serve God in awe and fear, then shouldn’t we do everything we can to surpass their works many times over?”

  Sitting at that table that night, wondering what in God’s name had prompted my dear little wife to stand up to her father and father-in-law, I was of two minds. On the one hand, I was exhilarated to see someone, anyone, giving those two pious old maids a run for their money, and Hindele was magnificent, as only an idealistic twelve-year-old can be. She stood with her fists clenched and her knuckles white with passion. (Girls were encouraged to read and learn in both our households; otherwise she would never have been able to find her voice, I’m certain.) On the other hand, these were our fathers, whose time, admittedly, was passing. They, and the men who thought as they did, were destined for the ash heap of history. To have a young girl urging them all the more quickly into that abyss couldn’t have been a pleasant experience for either man. Nor for those of us who loved them and were forced to witness the spectacle. Even I recoiled from Hindele. I felt as repulsed as everyone else and wondered if I would ever be able to look upon her again with affection and desire, a moot point, as it turned out, as this was the last time I’d ever see her.

  “Reb Alter Nosn!” Her father stood at the table. He jerked his napkin out of his collar and tossed it into his bowl of borscht. “How is it my daughter, whom I brought to you as pure as the whitened snows, has come to these heretical opinions while living in your home?”

  Before Father could respond, Hindele supplied the unfortunate answer herself: “My husband and I read books together.”

  “Books!” Reb Nuftile exclaimed.

  “Yankl!” Mother berated me.

  “What sort of books?” Reb Nuftile demanded.

  “Mama, it’s not what you think,” I said in my own defense.

  Hindele gave me a burning look. What self-respecting maskil whines so miserably to his mother?

  “No daughter of mine shall stay in such a house of apostasy!” her father roared.

  my father shot back at him. Take her then! (Judges 15:2).

  And so Reb Nuftile did. Forcing his wife, his daughters, and his sons up from the table, he escorted Hindele firmly from the room, from our house, and after the Sabbath from Szibotya and my life, from everything, in fact, except my memory.

  “No need to show us out!” he stormed, standing at the dining room door. “And as for the blessings following the meal, that can be dispensed with at a table of idolaters. This food is hardly kosher. Ester!” he called to his wife.

  AS I HAD been married against my will, so I was divorced against it. I’d never seen Father so piercingly splenetic. For six days, he said nothing, merely sat in his study staring out the window, his bilious mood infecting the entire house, radiating through it, poisoning its air like a sulfur, until the seventh day, when he stood up and, without a word, walked into town. Returning an hour before Shabbos, he announced that he had traded his son, as though I were damaged goods, to Zusha the Amalekite as a groom for his granddaughter
, the idiot girl Ita.

  “Father, no!” I pleaded with him, but he refused to hear me out. “I’m only a child,” I protested. “I don’t need to be married!”

  he said. Don’t tell me you’re just a child, because wherever I’ll send you, there you shall go! (Jeremiah 1:7).

  “No! I won’t go through with it!” I shouted in his face.

  My sisters restrained me as though I were a wild animal, while Father finished the verse: And everything I order you to say, you’ll say!

  Something broke inside me. Held down on all sides by my sisters’ fourteen arms, I looked up into Father’s face and saw nothing in it but unrelieved hatred. As the red-hot point of his anger scorched me, my world darkened. I couldn’t believe he was willing to debase himself so thoroughly out of spite, but hatred for me had overwhelmed his sense of proportion.

  All of Szibotya was invited to witness my humiliation. Every seat in our synagogue was full. Even in the women’s section upstairs, amused faces glowered down at us, their eyes lit with the same glee they might contain at the prospect of a particularly naughty Purim spiel. Zealot enough to ruin his own reputation, to make a laughingstock of himself for the sake of his piety, Father was certain, I’m sure, that by conspiring in his own degradation for the sake of the holy Torah, his exaltation would manifest like a translucent halo above his head before the eyes of all the wedding guests.

  Astonished to find myself once again beneath the wedding canopy, I felt like the Paschal Lamb: chosen, it’s true, but as a sacrifice. Whose fault was it that I had strayed, that I had corrupted myself with forbidden books, if not Father’s and the community he represented, all of whom had driven me to those books by the hollowness of their pietistic poses?

  I looked at Ita, at her flat face and her little hump, at the strings of saliva that flew from her mouth whenever she became too excited. She’d already crushed and destroyed most of the lilies in the bouquet they’d given her, twisting their stems in her uncomprehending agitation. Though any romantic hopes for herself were futile, what right had they to make a mockery of them? How could they so willfully blind themselves to the fact that beneath her concave, narrow chest, unconnected to her malfunctioning brain, beat the still quite feminine heart of a young girl, who, despite everything (this much was clear to see), wanted only to be loved?