“But I have no intention of leaving.”
“None whatsoever?”
Ita shook Fräulein Eckstein’s head, rising upon one elbow in her bed. “Why, just look at these tiny ankles and this graceful neck! She’s not the most refined of beauties, admittedly, but compared to the stubby, flat-chested drab in which I was formerly imprisoned, Eckstein is a playground of wonders. Oh God, I feel so … womanly!”
Dr. Freud raised a well-barbered eyebrow and sighed.
Ignoring him, Ita turned her attention to me. “Yankl,” she said, “why don’t you kiss me?”
Until that moment, I’d been happily overlooked, like an actor who, having played his scene, now watches the drama from the wings, in costume still, it’s true, but no longer in character. Indeed, I was shocked to hear myself addressed and, like an actor, by a name no one in my daily life ever called me. “Kiss you?” I said, all out of breath, as though I’d been forced to rush back onstage to deliver my lines.
Ita pouted fetchingly. “You know you’ve been wanting to ever since you saw me at the Carl.”
“That was you, Ita?”
“Why, of course it was me, silly boy. Now come over here and kiss me, my darling.”
This feminine command produced in me something of a dither; and the truth is: had Dr. Freud not been present, I might have succumbed. Fräulein Eckstein’s dulcet body, combined with Ita’s vulgar sensuality, stirred me to the core. My practice confined me, most days, to my clinic, and I had rare occasion, either professionally or otherwise, to visit women in their nightclothes. Ita had saucily untied the laces of Fräulein Eckstein’s gown, and inside her blouse front, the gentle chiaroscuro of her emancipated bust nearly robbed me of coherent speech. Also, the sweetness of being addressed by my childhood name in my native tongue by someone who knew me, indeed, who loved me, as a child was more than I could bear. Had the Sirens sung not a high wild sexual keening to the sailor Ulysses, but a lullaby in his native Greek, I’m certain no deck-hands with their ears stuffed with swab could have prevented him from tearing loose the ropes that bound him to the mast and plunging into the perishing oblivion of his own orgiastic desires. Though my childhood had ended bitterly, Ita’s purling Yankls and her Galician vowels returned it to me as though it were a cherished parcel I’d dropped in my haste to flee from home. Now I wanted nothing more than to erase the distance I’d placed between me and my former self, to collapse the intervening years, to enfold myself inside Ita’s arms, finding in her bosom the lost caresses of my mother and my sisters and my wives. I flashed an angry look at Dr. Freud; the thought pounded in my brain: Why shouldn’t I kiss her? By the laws of God and man, she’s my wife, after all!
“No! Don’t!” Dr. Freud said, grabbing me by my arm.
Had I actually taken a step towards her? Or had he read my mind?
“She’s not your wife,” he insisted. “In addition to everything we’ve discussed, and even if all the impossible things you believe to be true were true, still, the dead have no such claims upon the living.”
“Let him go!” Ita shrieked, turning Fräulein Eckstein’s hands into dainty fists, which she shook angrily in the air.
“Madam, I won’t!”
“But he wants me!”
“No, madam, he does not want you, but the whole lost world of his youth!”
CHAPTER 15
Naturally, in the cold light of day, everything seemed different. Though at first I could barely drag myself out of bed and had to force myself into the clinic, as the hours wore on, I realized that Dr. Freud was almost certainly correct. Clearly I couldn’t trust my own impressions. Guilt had kept Ita’s memory alive for too long in my conscience. Lying like a poisonous snake in the deepest coils of my mind was the guilty expectation that one day I would have to face her again, that one day I would have to stand trial before her for the harm that I, in my role as my father’s victim, had caused her. Certainly, my aggrieved conscience made me a less than objective witness in evaluating Fräulein Eckstein’s medical situation. Equally deluding was the unresolved business with my father. With the extraordinarily refined sensitivities granted to her by her disease, Fräulein Eckstein had divined my most vulnerable secrets and had told me everything she imagined I wanted to hear. Had she been a con artist or a spiritualist, and not an invalid, she no doubt would have already emptied my bank account.
No one, I had to remind myself, was denying the reality of the demonical possessions of yesteryear. Those poor sufferers had ranted and raved, they had taken on different identities, they had spoken in foreign languages and in different voices, exactly as the testimonies we have of them describe. Drs. Freud and Breuer’s great contribution to the enlightenment of the human race was not to deny these sufferers their symptoms, but to see more deeply, and less naïvely, into their medical causes.
Dr. Freud insisted I join him the next evening at Fräulein Eckstein’s bedside, and having persuaded myself that we were dealing with nothing more extraordinary than a complex symptom of an acute hysteria, I entered the sanatorium, my heart lighter than it had been when I’d left it the evening before. If these symptoms occasioned guilt and embarrassment in me, I told myself, it was not because I was facing the wife I’d abandoned, but because I was working without the rigorous psychological training Dr. Freud had imposed upon himself. I marveled at his ability to keep his head in the choppy waters of Fräulein Eckstein’s delusions.
When I arrived, he was carefully massaging the patient’s body, and so I entered her room and took a seat as far from her bed as I could, watching as Dr. Freud placed a faradic brush on Fräulein Eckstein’s constricted arm.
“That hurts a little bit,” she told him.
“I can stop it, if you wish.”
“The massage is better, I think.”
“Whichever you prefer.”
“The massage,” she said, and he began to softly stroke her epigastrium. “Ah, ah, yes, that’s … that’s so very nice.”
“Here?” Dr. Freud murmured. “A little lower.”
“Now?”
“Lower still, I think.”
“Good?”
“Ah, quite good, yes.” She gave out a luxurious sigh and gently stroked Dr. Freud’s hand as it caressed her. “May I ask you a question, Herr Doktor?”
“Of course, my Fräulein.”
“Is my case enlightening to you?”
“Enlightening?”
“Psychoanalytically speaking, I mean.”
“Quite.”
“More enlightening than Dr. Breuer’s famous case?”
“Oh, considerably so.”
“And you’ll publish it?”
“I hope to, yes.”
“And it will make your name?”
“Who can say, Fräulein?”
“No, I’m sure that it will.”
Dr. Freud drew in a deep breath. “But perhaps, in order for that to happen, you will tell me a bit more about the wedding.”
“Ita’s wedding?” Fräulein Eckstein asked.
“Who else’s?”
It was only then that I realized Dr. Freud had been hypnotizing Fräulein Eckstein. As he continued to stroke her lower abdomen, she looked dreamily at me. She was in a partial trance, it seemed, and finally she pointed towards me with her chin. “Do you know how much I’ve suffered for that one?” Squinting, she looked me in the eye.
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me,” Dr. Freud said.
The Fräulein was silent for a long moment.
“Of course, I knew the wedding was all wrong,” she said at last. “I bleated my refusals after Reb Alter Nosn had left our house, until Grandfather finally had to beat me.”
Fräulein Eckstein’s eyes were fully closed, and Dr. Freud gave me a significant look: the patient had succumbed again to her condition seconde.
“But I thought you loved our Yankl,” he whispered.
Fräulein Eckstein opened her eyes, and both she and Dr. Freud looked at me as they spoke to each other. I
ta had fully emerged.
“I did, but I knew they were forcing him, you see.”
“Ah,” Dr. Freud said.
“Still …”
“Yes, madam?”
“I hoped I could make him a good wife.”
“Of course,” he said.
“That somehow he might come to love me, if he could see me as you see me now. Because you love me, don’t you, Dr. Freud?”
With both hands, Dr. Freud grasped her hand. “Yes, madam. Very much so. I do.”
She pressed his hand against her cheek and, quite suddenly, grew bitter. “But thanks to the hideous body in which God had confined me, I knew he would hate me, that he would blame me, when all I wanted was for him to love me.” She dropped Dr. Freud’s hand and turned on her side in the bed in order to address me directly. “I wanted you to love me, Yankl!”
“Must I really be involved in this, Dr. Freud?” I said from my distant perch.
“Patience, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he cautioned me.
Fräulein Eckstein again took Dr. Freud’s hand and held it to her breast. “I prayed for it all night and all day in my bleating sheep’s tongue. I stood among the women in the synagogue, so that when they called out ‘Amen,’ I could repeat the word and have the merit of their prayers. Oh God, what a joke we were, Dr. Freud!”
“A joke, madam?”
“What a poisonous little tale Mendele could have made of us!”
“Ah, excellent.” Dr. Freud nodded.
“An intelligent boy caught reading worldly books is punished by a forced marriage to the village idiot! Oh, but then even the great Mendele Moykher-Sforim wouldn’t have seen what an idiot that idiot truly was. He would have painted me in tragic tones, Dr. Freud, but …”
“Yes, madam?”
“You have to understand: I wasn’t a victim.”
“No?”
“Because I conspired in my own humiliation, you see? Oh, I schemed along with the rest of them, placing myself in the center of their storm, fussing like a bride over every detail of her wedding, of her dress, of her bouquet. Do you remember the lilies, Yankl?”
Fräulein Eckstein turned to me. I nodded my head.
“His father spared no expense, Dr. Freud. My God, it was the most beautiful wedding Szibotya had ever seen! The synagogue lit by a thousand candles, the chupah made of Chinese silk.”
“The chupah was not made of Chinese silk,” I told Dr. Freud.
“The mayor, members of the Jewish council, the richest women and their husbands watched from the upper-story windows of their houses as our wedding procession marched down Szibotya’s muddy little streets. Yankl’s sisters, no doubt forced into it by their father, carried my train!”
“That much, I admit, is true.”
“The evening before, Dr. Freud, my grandmother even took me to the mikve. Oh my God, I almost died! My soul nearly left my body! I never dreamt I’d come as a bride to the mikve, never dreamt a man would take me as his lover. What am I saying? It’s all I dreamt about! But then” — her shoulders fell and she addressed me with an ugly sneer — “then I saw you beneath the chupah, Yankl, and I knew what a charade it all had been.”
“A charade, madam?”
She lay again on her back, and gripping Dr. Freud’s hand again, she placed it on her heart.
“I died in that moment, Dr. Freud.”
With his other hand, he stroked her forehead.
“Died, madam?”
“I knew I was being murdered. And who was murdering me? You, Yankl? Or your father? Or perhaps my grandfather? Was he finally succeeding, twelve years after tying the shoestring around my neck? Or were my murderers the townspeople, the mayor, the men of the Jewish council and their obscene wives, or the rebbe, for that matter, none of whom dared to confront your father!”
Crossing her arms, she eyed me critically. Dr. Freud had retreated behind the head of her bed and, in the silence that followed, all I could hear was his pen scratching across the pages of his notebook.
“Are you listening to this, Dr. Freud?” Ita called over Fräulein Eckstein’s shoulder, although she kept her eyes fixed on me.
“I’m listening, madam.”
“Because there he was, biting his lip beneath the chupah. He could barely look at me, and when he did, Dr. Freud, all I saw was that same scheming I’d seen on his father’s face the day he entered Grandfather’s shop to negotiate with him for the bride. I tried to smile at him, but of course, what did I know from smiling? I must have looked like a gargoyle, my mouth pulled into a horrible grin. Jewish weddings are short, thank God, and it was over before I knew it, and we were being escorted by the assembly into a private room for our moment of seclusion. The table was set with the finest meats and wines, fruits all the way from Africa! I told myself: Though I’m repulsive, though I’ve nothing to compare with his beautiful Hindele, still, a boy is a boy, isn’t that right? He’ll consummate the marriage, I thought, if only out of spite: ruin the bride and throw her back into their faces — eh, Dr. Freud? And so I leaned against the sofa, with my rump raised towards him, the way I’d seen dogs do in the street. But of course, it was all horribly wrong.”
“Ita,” I said quietly, “I was thirteen. I knew nothing of such things. My marriage to Hindele had been completely chaste.”
She wiped a tear from her eye. “Oh, this Eckstein!” She regarded her damp hand with an air of irritation. “She’s so sentimental! She’s been crying over me ever since I entered her.” She dried her hands on the bed quilt. “Is this what a woman’s heart is like? Or is it just the Viennese?”
A MOMENT PASSED, and a sly look crept across Fräulein Eckstein’s face. “Do you know how I managed it, Yankl?”
“Managed what?” I asked with no small amount of exasperation.
“Getting inside of her. Do you have any idea?”
“Of course not.”
“Shall I tell you then?”
I sighed. “If you wish.”
“Unfortunately, as you’ll one day discover, everything they told us is true.”
“What do you mean, Ita? Everything they told us?”
“Oh, all those horrible old tales. You thought they just meant to scare us, but that’s because you’re clever. Just like your precious friend here, Dr. Freud, you know nothing except how clever you are! But in the true world, Yankl, in the world of truth, it’s well known that a sinner like me can only enter a vessel that’s already been cracked. Eckstein’s vessel was cracked.” She smirked. “And do you want to know why?”
“I think that’s quite enough!” Dr. Freud roared. He stood and threw down his papers. “This is nothing but gossip and petty slander, madam, and I beg you to desist from saying anything further!”
“But it’s all part of my case history, isn’t it, Herr Doktor?”
“You and I know what you’re referring to. That is sufficient.”
“Yankl,” Ita whispered to me, “Eckstein abuses herself.”
“Oh, cruelest of harpies!” Dr. Freud nearly screamed.
“Ah,” Ita laughed, “he speaks to me as though I existed! I’m flattered!”
“You’re nothing but a wretched incubus! You know that, don’t you?”
Without going into vulgar detail, I will only report that Ita was not shy in using Fräulein Eckstein, along with a pillow, a hand mirror, a hairbrush, and a candle, in a graphic demonstration of her claims.
“Help me get her back into bed, Dr. Sammelsohn!” Dr. Freud exclaimed when Ita, having made her point, left the Fräulein in an exhausted, exhilarated heap upon the floor.
“It’s nothing that she and I haven’t gone over a thousand and one times during her analytic hours,” Dr. Freud confessed to me as he took her under the arms and I lifted her legs, and together we carried her back into bed. “Though I’m sorry you had to witness it. I think our work is over for the night.”
“No!” Ita shouted. “I will decide when our session is over!” She kicked off the covers we had so carefully tuc
ked in for her and stood on her knees on the bed, clearly not the same woman who had just spent her vital energies so frivolously.
“Fine, madam,” Dr. Freud said, hectored, exasperated. “Continue. As you wish. Certainly. Please.”
“However, Ita.” I could hold my tongue no longer, and I stood at the foot of her bed in order to challenge her. “You said Fräulein Eckstein’s deviance was a sufficient opening to allow a wretched sinner in. But how is it that you’re a sinner at all? What sins can a village idiot perform?”
“Not many, it’s true,” she said, as though charmed by this challenge. “Sinning takes imagination and concentration, two traits the faulty machinery of my brain couldn’t quite manufacture, isn’t that right? And yet, somehow, I managed to perform the blackest sin of all.”
“No, Ita, you didn’t!”
“I couldn’t have done it without your help, Yankele — thank you very much — or without the help of the entire town, for that matter. But surely one of your sisters wrote to you about it?”
“My father forbade all such communication.”
“Then you truly didn’t know?”
“There were things I felt it best to leave in the past.”
“Things, Yankl?”
“Forgive my rudeness, Ita. Not things, but people, events.”
She gave out a small, harsh laugh. Leaning forward on her knees, she placed her hands on her thighs and gave me a bitter look. “Then let me fill you in, my darling husband. Let me fill you in.”
• • •
ALERT TO THIS summons, Dr. Freud returned to his paper and his pen behind the bed; I returned to my chair.
“You remember the wedding feast they laid out to mock you?”
I started to answer her, but found that my voice had fled.
“Oh, I’d never seen such food in all my life, Dr. Freud! I didn’t understand the insult Reb Alter Nosn had intended with it, you see. The wheels and cogs of my brain couldn’t decipher irony. I saw only a delightful wedding feast, paid for by the man whose secret companion I’d been on his lonely sojourns in the forests. This is how he repays me for my faithfulness, I thought. But then you didn’t know that man, did you, Yankl?”
A Curable Romantic Page 21
