“I knew only the abrasive pietist, concerned lest one yod or tittle of the law should pass away.”
“Mm.” She nodded. “I watched in amazement as you stuffed as much food as you could into that little sack of yours. And when you taught me those awful slogans, you were no better, really, than your father. I was a stick you two used to pummel each other. If there’s anything I’ve learned in these dark realms, Dr. Freud, meeting other souls who lived in opposition to the will of Heaven and who, in death, oppose it still, it’s this: evil is committed by people who, having been harmed themselves, feel justified in harming others. On our wedding night — ha! despite everything, I still think of it as that! So let me be more accurate: on the day your father rubbed your nose in your sins, using me as a piece of filth, you saw me as no better, and why should you have? Oh, if only you could have seen me playing my part, Yankl! Sitting alone, nibbling the few figs you’d seen fit to leave me. Didn’t they fit into your sack or did you actually for a moment consider my hunger? I’d been fasting all day, in the manner of a good, pious bride, fasting to atone for my sins and for those of my husband, so that I could come to you with all the innocence of a baby, enter the marriage newly born like a baby entering the world. On the other side of the door, I could hear the klezmorim playing one tuneless tune after another. How many guests remained in the great hall, waiting to see the joke through to its end? Did anyone suspect the denouement you’d contrived? I’d exhausted myself in tears long before I heard a commotion stirring up on the other side of the door. I could hear question marks gathering there, as though in a printer’s bin. Preparing to meet the wedding horde, I dried my eyes on the hem of my gown and finally, after much knocking and pounding, the door flew open.
“With your father and my grandfather at its head, a quorum of men entered the room. Perhaps they’d expected to find me with my throat slashed or the two of us self-poisoned, although I doubt it: we were Jews, and though a legalistic cruelty isn’t beyond us, murder and suicide are quite beyond our Pale. No doubt such were their pious fantasies that they expected to find us reconciled to our new state, you happily chastened and no longer playing the rebellious son.
“ ‘Where’s Ya’akov?’ your father demanded, and it was with all the concentration and intention I could muster that I didn’t repeat what he had just said, but instead, I squinted my eyes and summoned forth to my lips what you had told me to say: ‘Unkull guh lee-ber-ate de mah-sez, et cetera, et cetera. Sh-sh-shay-mmm uhn ye-e-u pi-yus … frowds!’ For some reason, this phrase was quite easy on the tongue, and I couldn’t stop repeating it. I must have been shrieking it still when Grandfather stepped forward and slapped me in the face. Your father rebuked him, then left me in his care. ‘But I don’t want her!’ he shouted at your father’s back. ‘She’s your daughter-in-law now! You take care of her!’ Your father was already at the window like a police inspector surveying the scene of the crime.
“ ‘Where is Yankl?’ your mother said, entering the room. ‘Gone,’ one of your sisters said. ‘He’s gone?’ ‘The boy’s gone,’ your father told her.
“It was as though you had done something completely outside the realm of the possible, as though you’d become a Moor or turned yourself into a bird. After all, Jewish sons do not run away, just as Jewish fathers do not force their children to do anything that is not ultimately for their own good.
your father cried, Woe is me that I have destroyed my house and exiled my children (BT Berachos 3a).
“The look on his face was unbearable to see: it was the face of a man who’d gone too far and who now understood that his actions were irrevocable. Far worse was the look on your mother’s face: bitter, accusing, naked, perhaps for the first time, of all illusion. She saw her husband as she’d never seen him before: as the man who had now irreversibly embittered her life. If, in this instance, I, a mere village idiot, could see their entire life passing between them, as though in a moment of divine judgment, what did the others in our little mob of outraged citizens see with their fuller powers of comprehension? The exasperation knitted into your mother’s brow seemed to say: It’s bad enough, oh, it’s bad enough, all these years, you’ve gone out into the forest like a madman with your poems, and we humored you; you’ve hungered after that repulsive little troll Blume Levanthal and I ignored it; but now you’ve driven my only son from our house, and I can no longer bear you!
“You could almost hear the one small chamber of her heart still open with affection towards him buckling. He seemed crushed. His beard seemed to whiten before our eyes. The hook of his scholar’s stoop, always rounded like a question mark, ceased signifying intellectual inquiry and now broadcast dumbfounded incomprehension. As for myself, I became aware of the fact that everyone in the room was looking at me. I understood I was a problem without a solution, a bloody mark upon their lintel signifying to the Angel of Life that he may as well pass over their houses and withhold his blessings. To your father, I was proof of what an ornery fool he was. To your mother, I was a hostage who would never be redeemed, held in captivity forever against the return of her son. I seemed to have exchanged a family who wished me dead for a family who wished I’d never been born. I was moving up in the world, but at that moment that thought was of little comfort to me. All I could think of was you, Yankl. Yes, you! Oh, how I loved you! How I wanted you! Oh, and the children I wanted to give you! As tempers reached their boiling point, as accusations and recriminations, long simmering, bubbled over, while no one was looking, indeed while your father and mother were arguing over what was to be done with me, I slipped out. Nobody saw me, or if they did, no one alerted anyone else, and I made my way to the river. For where else do heartbroken girls go?”
“Ita,” I said softly, “tell me you didn’t.”
“Drowning myself was easy, Yankele. No one had ever taught me how to swim, and I’d heard enough love stories to know that at the moment I jumped into the waters from a rocky ledge, you would appear on the horizon to save me.”
“You drowned yourself? Ita!”
Fräulein Eckstein’s face reddened with the memory. “The water was cold, and I was crying, of course. I was a foolish girl. Crying as the water covered me like a goose-down quilt on a cold winter’s night. ‘This will be my wedding bed,’ I told myself dramatically. ‘These hard river rocks will be my pillows.’ I grew drowsy and, for a moment, I slept.”
Dr. Freud lifted his eyes from his notes. His pen stopped scratching. We both waited for her to continue.
“But only for a moment.” She smiled, in triumph, like Scheherazade, content to hold her listeners in a chasm of silence between one part of her story and the next.
“And after that?” I finally said.
“Well, after that,” she said, “I was no longer cold, nor wet, nor even in the river. I sat upon its banks, watching the poor, wretched girl below me. She looked like a rag doll that had been tossed into a puddle by a careless child. ‘Who is that unfortunate girl?’ I asked, not expecting a reply, and so I was stunned to hear a voice very near my ear whispering, ‘She doesn’t concern you anymore.’ “
CHAPTER 16
And who was it who spoke these words to you?”
“Oh, Yankl, I’d never seen anyone so beautiful!”
“Yes, but who was it?” I insisted.
“Impossible to say!” Once again, she was on her knees on the bed, her arms spread wide apart, describing the scene. “Because the being had four faces.”
“Four faces? Ita!”
“A man’s, a woman’s, a lion’s, and a child’s — oh, and magnificent fiery wings!”
I glanced across Fräulein Eckstein’s sickbed and met Dr. Freud’s skeptical expression. With his eyebrows raised, he seemed to be stroking the inside of his cheek with his tongue. Ita didn’t notice, however, and continued with her story.
“It dropped its cloak about my shoulders and pulled me away from the water.
“ ‘There’s no time to mourn now,’ the woman said.
“ ‘Look,’ the bearded man commanded me. And, oh, Yankl!” Ita raised her hands to her cheeks. “The face in the mirror had no features. It was a radiant, honeyed flame.
“ ‘Leave this,’ the lion said, puffing out its chest and pointing with its chin towards the rag doll in the river. Her wedding dress had grown brown in the water. It looked as though it’d been steeped in tea.
“ ‘She’s no longer your concern, nor mine, nor ours,’ they said all at once, their wings rustling with fire.
“ ‘This is who you are,’ the man said, tapping his finger on the mirror.
“I looked again at the rag doll and then at the mirror. ‘Oh, if Yankl could only see me like this,’ I thought. In response, the woman pronounced a word that sounded as though it were formed completely of vowels, a word I recalled never having heard before, but which I nevertheless recognized as my own name.”
“Can you transcribe it for us?” Dr. Freud asked.
“I’ll try.”
Taking a piece of paper and his pen from him, Ita curled her tongue against her upper lip — she had never been taught to write — and scratched out in a very childish hand the name by which she’d been addressed: .
“Something like that, I think.”
“Hm,” Dr. Freud said.
“The man stroked his beard, the woman crossed her arms, the lion shook his head. ‘Child,’ he roared, ‘come along with us. You mustn’t resist.’
“ ‘Yankl is gone,’ the man said, and the child piped in, , you’re in enough trouble as it is.’ But still I refused.”
“You refused, Ita? But why?”
“I may have spat in God’s face, Yankl, I may have thrown away the life our Father in Heaven had given me, but I was a bride, and a bride who was still a virgin. I too had my claims, and I wasn’t going to be denied!
“ ‘Oh dear, oh dear, here we go again,’ the lion roared unhappily.
“ ‘If you persist in this, the woman warned, ‘the horde will soon descend.’
“ ‘The horde?’ I said.
“ ‘In the morning,’ the child told me, ‘you’ll hunger for evening. In the evening, you’ll pray for dawn.’
“This was disagreeable news indeed, but still, I kept my resolve. ‘Is there no place then,’ I asked, ‘where I may shelter in the meantime while waiting for Yankl to join me?’
“ ‘Each time we meet’ — the bearded man sighed — ‘you ask the right wrong questions.’
“ ‘We’ve met before?’
“ ‘Oh, many, many times.’
“ ‘Short lives and violent deaths seem to be your métier,’ the lion roared.
“ ‘We meet as though between the acts of a very long play,’ the bearded man said, and the woman added: ‘Although not so long usually in your case.’
“ ‘About this sheltering,’ I said.
“ ‘Oh, don’t be foolish now.’
“ ‘Tell me!’ I insisted.
“ ‘As we are bound to the truth, we shall tell you.’ The man instructed me: ‘You may shelter in a stone, in an animal, or in another human being, though I promise you you’ll find no peace there. You laugh?’ he said to me. ‘You think this is amusing?’
“I looked again, knowing it was for the last time, at the body of that poor drowned girl, lying among the river rocks. ‘Poor Ita,’ I thought. ‘Well, this ended badly,’ I said.
“ ‘It will end badly,’ the bearded man corrected me. ‘While you continue to resist, things are far from over.’
“ ‘Bless me then, angel?’ I asked them shyly.
“ ‘Alas, poor the woman said, ‘there isn’t time.’
“It chilled me to the bone to see the angelic being raise all eight of its eyes and gaze past my shoulder. I turned to look at what they were seeing.”
“And what were they seeing, Ita?” I said.
“Oh, Yankl, on the horizon, under a purple sky, moving as though in a dirty rain cloud towards the promontory upon which we all stood, was the horde.”
She stared into the space before her, as though witnessing it all again. “I’d never seen such a rude and murderous crew, certainly not in the previous world, with their dirty black wings and their sharp claws and the hideous insignias inked all over their reptilian skins.
“ ‘Are these angels as well?’ I asked.
“ ‘Of a sort,’ the man said.
“ ‘Demons,’ the woman elaborated.
“ ‘A subcategory,’ the child explained.
“ ‘Good-bye for now, darling the lion roared. ‘If I were you and if you sincerely mean to resist …’
“ ‘Yes, angel? Counsel me, please!’
“ ‘… I’d run!’ said he.
“In a twinkling, he or she or they or it were gone, and I was left to face the advancing horde alone.”
Ita swallowed and wet her lips. “Oh, what a sight these dark angels were, Yankl! Their noses were so long, they drooped to the middle of their chests. Flames shot out of their nostrils. Their burning cudgels had charred their skins. Their sooty wings beat at their dirty backs. The black leather harness each wore was studded with spikes and gleaming metal bits. Among them were men and women, brothers and sisters it seemed from the similarity of their features, and only because the laws of forbidden intercourse do not apply to angels was I able to get away from them. For just as they’d spotted me, just as the chase was about to begin, each of these dogmen, their uncircumcised members grown as long as curved scimitars at the smell of their frightened prey, grabbed a sister by the hair and threw her to the ground where, growling and biting, they mounted her for their pleasure, three or four brothers to a sister, as the women were in the minority. The other males stopped to watch, laughing their cruel laughter, pulling their brothers off and replacing them when their patience wore thin. Immortal, they seemed to delight in thrashing one another to within an inch of their eternal lives, slitting open one another’s bellies, for example, and yanking out one another’s intestines, bashing one another’s heads in, the recipient of the blows more aroused, it seemed, than his tormentor.
“How much of this horror can I relate to you? Only one more thing: as I stood watching this terrible sight, these dark angels kept their eyes, seven to a skull, fastened upon me, man and woman alike, as if to tell me that it didn’t matter, that they had all the time in the world, that I was going nowhere and could never run far or fast enough to elude them. And yet they were clearly urging me on, if only for the sport of it, I thought. What pleasure would there be in it for them if I submitted? I understood as much and, when they contrived to look away, their attention drawn to the yelping of one of their sisters as she climaxed, flailing beneath the weight of her brothers — two of whom sat with their knees upon her outstretched arms and two upon her outstretched legs — I fled. I fled, knowing that my capture was inevitable, knowing that if they caught me, they would abuse me horribly, hurling me from one end of the universe to the other, like a ball in a game of toss. My escape was from any reasonable point of view futile. Is there any place where God’s will may be overturned? But the dead are only human, and are therefore subject to self-deception, isn’t that correct, Dr. Freud? And so I ran. Or rather, they let me run. The pleasure for the pursuer is not in the capture, but in the heart-thumping terror of the chase, fear making sweeter the lashings and the beatings. I ran, the horde on my heels, my back lashed by the teeth of their whips, their garlicky breath in my ears, until suddenly in my terror I recalled the words of my guardian — ‘In a stone, in an animal, in another human being’ — and I jumped inside a granite crucifix stationed over a grave. At least here, they were powerless to touch me. Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t bear the idolatrous spirits inhabiting the stone, and I leapt into a rock. Lifetimes later, it seemed, this rock was thrown by a small boy into a stable. My presence there drove the horses mad. One beast, in its fright, beat agains
t the rock with its hooves until I was driven out. The punishing horde was waiting for me still, I knew, but somehow I was able to dive headfirst into the entrails of a cow. I hoped that its slaughter by a kosher butcher would at last atone for my sins and end this long, mad dash, the ultimate point of which I was beginning to forget. The stench of the beast was intolerable, however, and I jumped into a horse, and when I overheard the coachman saying he was traveling to Vienna the next day, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All of a sudden, I remembered the object of my desire.”
“Which was?”
“Why, you, of course, Yankl! You! I was nearer to you than I had ever been.”
I blushed at these words. “I was your goal?” I said.
According to Ita, it was not out of spite or rebellion that she’d refused to submit to the Heavenly Tribunal. Neither was she afraid of the punishments waiting for her there. She knew what she had done: she was a suicide, a sinner as black as any, blacker than most, in fact, and although she might believe she was driven to it by other hands, she was realistic enough to know that, as a defense, this tack would be laughed out of the Heavenly Court by the Heavenly Judges, who, unlike their human counterparts, could not be moved to pity. Submit, she knew, endure the shaming fires of Gehenna, and be cleansed, made new and as white as a freshly laundered shirt. (The more time she spent in the corridor between lives, the clearer her memories of her previous visits became. How clearly she now recalled the steam-cleaning each soul receives at the end of its sentence, the great, steaming machinery through which each is pressed, before being hung to dry, wrinkleless and crisp, and placed into a zygote by the same angelic hands that secrete the scent inside each rose.) It would have been easy to turn herself in, to surrender, if it weren’t for the thinnest hopes she still had of attaining her goal, which was (I blush to transcribe this): me. When at last the coachman arrived in Vienna, she knew her wanderings were nearing their end.
Leaning forward in bed, she exclaimed: “Don’t ask me how I found your Fräulein Eckstein, Yankl. Accept that the Hand of God aids saints and sinners alike. What in a novel might be called coincidence is merely the invisible machinery of Heaven awkwardly revealing itself, and there I was. How glorious is our Lord, Yankl; though I spit in His face, He opens His hand to satisfy the desire of every living thing. Fräulein Eckstein’s hand opened to her desire as well, as I explained earlier, indeed as I demonstrated, and I slipped in thereby, lodging between the blooming rose of her old maidenhood and the storehouse of mulch and dreck. In life, I’d learned to expect little, and so I was happy there, until one evening — oh, one glorious evening! — she accompanied her mother to the Carl. And that’s where I saw you. Yes, my love! Way, way, way up in the fourth or fifth gallery. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I would draw you to me, using Fräulein Eckstein as an old paillard might a young boy to sexually ensnare the child’s mother.”
A Curable Romantic Page 22
