A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

You must be precise about all foreseeable conditions and occurrences. I reiterated the bargain he proposed to strike: ‘You promise to leave this poor girl without harming her in any way, neither physically or spiritually, and you will cease your wanderings and submit to the righteous judgments of the Heavenly Court, if I promise to recite the prayer for the dead on your behalf?’

  “ ‘For the full eleven months!’ he cried. He, too, was being careful, indeed exquisitely so, with the terms of our agreement, as much hung in the balance.

  “ ‘For the full eleven months!’ I agreed.

  “ ‘So you’ve promised.’

  “ ‘And so it shall be done, Messina!’

  “ ‘Swear it!’

  “ ‘No, Messina, you swear!’

  “ ‘I swear!’ said he.

  “ ‘On what?’

  “ ‘On the One True and Holy God and upon His Sacred Torah!’

  “ ‘Then it is promised,’ said I.

  “ ‘And I am released,’ said he.

  “At that moment, a bitter wind from the sea blew open the windows of the girl’s room. I could hear the sound of wild horses neighing somewhere nearby in terrible distress.

  “ ‘Rabbi, help me!’ the maiden cried out, but in two voices at once, her own and Messina’s. Her body pitched and jerked so fiercely, it seemed at times to be suspended above her bed, the sheets billowing in a furious bedlam. At odd moments, I could, when the covers lifted from her thrashings, see the mass, the lump, beneath her skin, moving from her chest to her waist and down her legs and finally to her foot. She shrieked in pain. The sound was like a bow being raked across the bridge of a violin. Her foot, pushing out from beneath the covers, swelled to twice its size, and then, with a spurting starburst of blood, the nail of her little toe popped off. And it was by this egress that the spirit of Bernardo Messina ultimately left her body.

  “ ‘Call a physician!’ I roared at my student Benyamin Navarro. ‘A doctor!’ Navarro shouted out the door. A rank miasma filled the air above our heads. ‘Blessed is the name of the Lord,’ I could hear Messina’s voice crying out. ‘And blessed is his servant, Rabbi Leonardo Emanuel!’

  “The miasma was sucked out the window by the vacuum of a wind-storm, a minor hurricane, and everything returned to normal order. I waited until the doctor came. He bandaged the girl’s toe and gave her a sleeping draught. Resisting sleep at first, however, she called me to her side. ‘Rabbi Leonardo,’ she said.

  “ ‘Yes, my child?’

  “ ‘I have a confession to make. I’ve recently succumbed to the beliefs of the so-called enlightened ones, and though I outwardly maintained a pious face, inwardly I’d begun to doubt and mock the existence of God and the authority of his holy Torah. I know now that by opening myself to these doubts, I made a space for the evil dybbuk who violated me. Know now and hear me clearly that I repent and again believe and affirm my belief in the oneness of the holy name, blessed be He.’

  “Children, never has a face appeared so radiant to me as did hers in that moment. ‘Sleep, daughter,’ I counseled her. ‘Sleep, my child, for you will not be troubled by unpleasant dreams tonight. This much I assure you.’

  “ ‘Our work here is done,’ I said, taking leave of the grateful household. To the girl’s father, I said, ‘My young pupil will remain in the hall to recite psalms throughout the night. Make certain he has enough to eat and to drink.’

  “I returned to the synagogue, and in the morning, during my devotions, I recited the prayer for the dead on behalf of the penitent Bernardo Messina, as I continued to do faithfully and consistently for the mandatory eleven months, after which the old rascal appeared to me in a dream, bearing with him, as a gift — would you believe it? — a magnificent and handsome stallion!”

  CHAPTER 14

  By the time I’d finished telling my tale, the evening had grown quite late. The streets were drowsing under their snowy garments. In the glow of the gas lamps as we drove past them, I could see the gleam of a rueful squint in Dr. Freud’s eye. Condescending, benevolent, it was the indulgent look with which an adult meets the story of a child’s love affair. Now, now, it seemed to suggest, you may feel such things are real, but because I am older and wiser, I know better; and when you are older and wiser, you shall know better, too.

  With the tip of his cane, Dr. Freud worked some detritus off the bottom of his shoe.

  “A boy is taken to the circus,” he said with a sigh, “and there, because he witnesses acrobats whirling in the Heavens, he believes not only that people can fly but that there is something wrong with him for not being able to.” He shook his head. “Ah, how we prefer our illusions! Why, even the simple workmen you tend to as a doctor prefer to be thought of as blind.”

  “Yes, because the government insurance compensates them and they’re let off from work.”

  “A man is always well compensated for his blindness,” Dr. Freud told me.

  He trimmed another proscribed cigar, making a great show of lighting it, the sulfurous match illuminating his face in reds and yellows. He drew the flame through the rolled cylinder. With his hands on the top of his stick and the cigar cradled between his fingers, he gazed out the window into the inky shadows blotting the facades of the buildings we passed. This was the Freud he would soon bequeath to history: the skeptical unriddler of Sphinxy riddles.

  His neck swathed in woolen scarves, he blew out a frank-smelling puff of smoke. “Two dybbuks for one village rabbi. That’s statistically excessive, don’t you think? Even if the two episodes occurred hundreds of years apart!”

  “I assure you I wouldn’t know.” I was miserable at having given him a stick with which to beat me in the ribs.

  “Still one might have a sense of what is statistically normal, even in the realm of the paranormal.”

  “I’m not a statistician.”

  “I never implied that you were.”

  “Nor a historian.”

  “Granted.”

  “I only told you what I saw with my own eyes or heard with my own ears.”

  “Saw with your own eyes, yes, but admittedly only for the briefest of moments and in an emotionally roiled state, which is to say, while being jostled by a stranger who held you captive.” Dr. Freud sat facing me, his shoulder pressed against the seat. “Now, isn’t it more likely, Dr. Sammelsohn, that what you mistook for an unnatural bulge in that sick woman’s throat was a tumor or a goiter which, under normal circumstances, she kept hidden under a high collar or beneath a shawl, women being in reality the vain creatures we have long imagined them to be; or more likely than a tumor, her breast, unintentionally revealed in her delirium, and occasioning in you, in conjunction with the swaddling sensation of being held so tightly, an almost unbearable sense of returning to the helplessness of infancy? Instead of a breast, you willed yourself to see a lump, and imagined, for cultural reasons, that this lump was a dybbuk. In this way, you avoided confronting your amorous feelings towards your own mother, while remaining within the charmed circle of the pious whose members would otherwise have condemned you for the only-too-normal, in a boy of that age, ogling of a woman’s undressed bosom.”

  “And the rebbe and his story? How do you explain that?”

  Dr. Freud looked at me as though he were a con man sizing up an easy mark. “I cannot, of course, say what that gang of men was doing in that poor woman’s bedroom, an activity whose discovery was so dangerous to them that they felt the need to post guards at the door, but I’ve no doubt from my own experiences with such charlatans, that your rebbe would have exploited any occasion to promote the notion that a not small portion of the fealty one must swear to the Creator of the Universe may be justly allotted to him as the Lord’s emissary. In this way is propped up the rigid scaffolding of a strict social and legal hierarchy that not coincidentally enshrines him at its summit.”

  Dr. Freud drew his watch from his vest pocket and tilted its face towards the candle burning in the cab’s lamp. “In any wise,” he said, winding it
and holding it to his ear, “one shouldn’t underestimate mankind’s capacity to delight in all sorts of sheer nonsense.”

  THE FIACRE DREW up to a building I didn’t recognize. Dr. Freud paid the fare. “Come along, Dr. Sammelsohn.” He’d leapt from the cab and was stamping his walking stick upon the ground in a pantomime of impatience. “The hour is later than I’d anticipated.”

  I climbed out and followed him to the gate. I’d never been to the Sanatorium Loew before. The building was part of a large estate once belonging to a Count von Esterhazy who, as I dimly recalled, had gone mad after donating it to the city as a clinic, becoming, in effect, the first recipient of his own charity. We crossed the clinic’s gardens, and Dr. Freud let himself in with a key. “Physician’s privileges,” he murmured. “And there’s no need to disturb the staff.” He guided me into the foyer. “This way,” he said.

  A nurse in a starched white bonnet sat behind a reception desk. Dr. Freud nodded to her, and she nodded in return. “Dr. Freud,” they said to each other simultaneously, he identifying himself, she confirming that she knew him.

  Taking my arm like a chatelaine, he led me down a long passageway. “Fräulein?” Dr. Freud opened the door to Fräulein Eckstein’s room, and though he called in, he elicited no response.

  I held back in the hallway. “Come in, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he whispered.

  Walking through the darkened room, Dr. Freud reached for the gas lamp and adjusted its flame. Nothing he had told me on the drive over had prepared me for the sight that greeted me now: Fräulein Eckstein lying in her bed, her face a ghastly white; her eyes wide open; her mouth a gash; her tongue sticking out at the ceiling; her legs stiff; her arms rigid at her sides, their fingers splayed; with barely a twinge of life in her.

  We stood on either side of the bed. Holding a small candle, I examined her. I had the impression of a prisoner gagged and bound. The eyes especially — I cannot describe them as hers — were haunting: empty, ringed in black; and though she stared up at the ceiling, it was as though her eyes saw nothing themselves, but were being used, as windows, by a being inside her. As with Khave Kaznelson, she possessed a lump, an unnatural bulge, beneath the skin of her throat.

  Dr. Freud placed his palm on her forehead, and Fräulein Eckstein’s body seemed to relax.

  “She’s had a bran bath,” he told me quietly, “and I earlier gave her a massage. Now I have only to hypnotize her, and we can begin tonight’s session.”

  Dr. Freud spoke to her in a voice too low for me to hear, while lightly pressing her body in various places. Slowly, Fräulein Eckstein’s mouth opened, and to my surprise, words were pushed through it like letters being pushed through a mail slot.

  “Yankl …” she said in a voice unrecognizable as her own.

  Dr. Freud gave me a significant look, as he reached down to take Fräulein Eckstein’s pulse. “You see, madam. I’ve kept my promise,” he said.

  Madam, not miss: I assumed this choice of words was all part of Dr. Freud’s therapeutic acceptance of Fräulein Eckstein’s delusion, but it chilled me to hear the word spoken. In reply, Fräulein Eckstein’s head was turned — I can only speak of her in the passive case; she seemed a puppet in the hands of a will greater than her own — and made to look at Dr. Freud. There was no mistaking the expression affixing itself to her face. I’d never seen a man appraised so dismissively, as though he were no more than an errand boy. (How different this face was from the adoring face Fräulein Eckstein normally presented to him.) For his part, Dr. Freud took the slight in stride and set about checking other of the patient’s vital signs.

  “Unhand her!” something or someone seemed to shriek from inside Fräulein Eckstein’s body. “There’ll be time enough for these procedures! You can draw up her death certificate if you must keep yourself busy.”

  Dr. Freud relented and backed away. From the shadows, he prompted me silently. I cleared my throat. “Ita?” I said, addressing the voice.

  Color flushed beneath the skin of Fräulein Eckstein’s face. Though its features remained as rigid as before, the skin radiated a girlish blush. “You know me then?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I said.

  “How have you been keeping, my darling husband?”

  How to describe this odd phenomenon? The rigid features had disappeared and Fräulein Eckstein’s face resembled a translucent mask through which another’s features were discernible. The impression was similar to seeing a real face beneath the reflection of one’s own on the surface of a lake.

  I asked her the first thing that came into my head. “How is it that you can speak now?”

  “Oh, Yankl — or Kobi — or whatever it is they call you now — are you still such a stupid boy?”

  Uncertain how to proceed, I glanced at Dr. Freud. He signaled with a slight upward movement of his chin that I should answer her honestly. And so, crossing my arms, I said, “Well, that’s a difficult thing to evaluate subjectively, I suppose.”

  “No, no, you’re right,” she said. “You’re quite right.” And she laughed grimly. “Better to allow others to decide who’s clever and who’s dull.”

  “MAY I SIT here?” I gestured towards a chair.

  Fräulein Eckstein nodded, which is to say her head shook as though it had been had grabbed by its hair. I turned to Dr. Freud. He was standing in the shadows thrown off by the gas lamps. He nodded as well, and I drew the chair closer to Fräulein Eckstein’s bedside.

  Fräulein Eckstein’s head swiveled on its neck so that it now faced me. I looked into her eyes. Beyond the two little images of myself I saw trapped in their glassy surfaces, I saw nothing of Ita. “Perhaps I can relax and inhabit her fully?” the voice inside the Fräulein suggested.

  Again, I looked at Dr. Freud, a little grace note of a glance; he nodded back with an equal quickness.

  “I think that would be all right,” I said, sitting up straight and preparing for the interview.

  “Only don’t hurt her,” Dr. Freud commanded.

  “Of course not,” the Fräulein said.

  Dr. Freud and I watched as Fräulein Eckstein writhed in her bed. The little bulge I’d noticed protruding from her neck was hidden from my view beneath the bedsheets. If it moved beneath her gown like a mouse beneath a tablecloth, I didn’t see it. In the next moment, Fräulein Eckstein’s arms and legs came to life, and she stretched. Her face lost its pallor, and when she spoke, the words were no longer shouted through the aperture of her open mouth, but were clearly shaped and articulated by it.

  “Oh, oh my, but that’s so much better, really,” she said, sitting up in her bed and pulling her legs beneath her in a girlish way. She let her hands fall into the circle of her lap. “May I take your hand, Yankl?”

  “Best not,” Dr. Freud cautioned.

  Fräulein Eckstein turned to him, as though surprised to find him still in the room. Hadn’t she dismissed him? For a moment, it seemed as though she were considering screaming at him but had decided, in my presence at least, to forego all unseemly behavior.

  “As you wish,” she said sweetly, so sweetly, in fact, I could think of nothing but the poisoned sugar people leave out for rats. I folded my arms and sat back in the chair with my ankles crossed, letting a forelock of my hair fall charmingly across my brow. I hoped to look as sympathetic and bemused as I could, as though I were a bachelor uncle whose precocious niece had run away to join him in the city. There was no question but that such an uncle would send the girl back home, but he would do so without reprimands or censure, so as not to impair the child’s affection for him.

  “Ita, Ita, Ita,” I sighed, attempting to credit Fräulein Eckstein’s delusions as much as possible, as Dr. Freud had instructed me to do. “I’m afraid my relations with my family have been … well, shall we say, strained since the night of our … can we really call it a wedding? I think not. Communication hasn’t been as constant as familial affection might otherwise allow, and I’m afraid I hadn’t, until now, been apprised of your death.” />
  It felt an odd thing to say to a person.

  “So no one told you about it then?” she asked.

  I raised my palms in a gesture of helpless sorrow. “No, but permit me to extend my condolences now.”

  Her features contracted behind the mask of Fräulein Eckstein’s face until she resembled a badgered dog.

  “Oh, Yankl, Yankl!” she cried, sobbing into Fräulein Eckstein’s hands. “I know you didn’t love me. I may have been an idiot, but I wasn’t a fool!”

  I handed her my handkerchief.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No, no, please,” I said.

  She daubed at her tears.

  “You’re very kind.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  She drew a shawl about her shoulders and attempted to gain control of her weeping. I looked at Dr. Freud. I have to say: the mise-en-scène was disconcerting. Though the body belonged to Fräulein Eckstein, the voice wasn’t hers at all; and this confusion of identities was maddening. To whom was I speaking? To Fräulein Eckstein or — but no, it wasn’t possible! — to Ita Sammelsohn? A poisoned headache stirred up behind my eyes, and I understood no man at that moment better than I did Josef Breuer. Like Dr. Breuer, all I wanted was to flee. Who wouldn’t prefer a trip to Italy to this stuffy bedchamber and these difficult psycho-pathologies? However, as I’d been deputized by Dr. Freud, I felt duty-bound to carry on as competently as I could. It was my job to test the weave of Fräulein Eckstein’s impersonation and reveal whatever holes I could find in the fabric.

  “When you say you knew I didn’t love you, Ita, what exactly do you mean?”

  She laughed. “Oh, you’d be surprised at the things I understood, Yankl.”

  “For instance?” I probed as delicately as I could.

  “Of course, no one imagined I understood anything at all.”

  “That was Szibotya,” I said, as though this explained everything. “They treated me the same way.”

  “And so no one feared speaking in front of me.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. That’s true.” I said this as much to Dr. Freud as to Fräulein Eckstein.