Ita looked out brazenly from inside Fräulein Eckstein’s face. “And the rest you more or less know,” she said with a little shrug.
I looked at Dr. Freud, seated behind the head of her bed. He wore his Tarock face, letting nothing show. How absurd we seemed, he and I, how ill prepared for such a cosmic turn of events, with our late-empire beards, and comical pince-nez and other turn-of-the-century sartorial fripperies. Ita, on the other hand, seemed as happy as a hypochondriac to have two such attentive suitors at her bedside.
“And so there we are,” she said, leaning back comfortably into her pillows.
THERE WE WERE indeed.
“Do you mind if … if I take a sip of your water?” I said to Fräulein Eckstein, or to Ita, or to whomever. What did it matter? I’d asked only out of politeness, and neither of them responded. My hands trembled as I poured a glass from their bedside pitcher. (Yes, their. It was impossible for me to think of them now as other than two souls residing in a single body. They were like flatmates who’d outgrown the small apartment they nevertheless continued to share.) “Sorry,” I said, bending down with one of Dr. Freud’s massage towels to mop up the water I’d spilled.
“Dr. Sammelsohn, why don’t you sit down!” Dr. Freud said sharply. “Either the water will dry of itself or we’ll send for a nurse to sop it up.”
“Yes … thank you,” I said. “I think I will.” I sat and brought the glass to my mouth, sipping inexpertly and choking as a result.
My life felt like an ill-fitting suit someone else had picked out for me; I barely recognized myself in it: Was I truly the sort of man who could drive his wife to murder herself?
“Stop luxuriating in your guilt,” Dr. Freud said to me.
I raised my eyes to find him and Ita (or was it Fräulein Eckstein?) staring at me, Dr. Freud with his invasive gaze: the seer, the knower of open secrets, the diviner of poorly hidden things. It was alarming to find myself the object of their attentions. Of all the characters in this strange drama, I imagined myself far from being its protagonist. Wasn’t I the most minor of players here: an insignificant consultant called in by the great doctor; a forgettable suitor to the mysterious patient; a husband for no more than a few hours to the avenging Fury; the wayward, problematical son to the extraordinarily successful businessman and scholar? Who was I to find myself the author of everyone’s sorrows? The answer resounded simply and clearly: You are Ya’akov Yosef Sammelsohn, murderer of your wife.
“May I see you in the passageway outside?” Dr. Freud said, gesturing with his head. I rose from my chair, knocking into the table as I did and tipping over the glass I’d left there. The rest of the water ran off the table onto the chair and dribbled onto the floor. Torn between honoring Dr. Freud’s wishes and mopping up the spill, I hesitated so that Dr. Freud had no choice but to bark: “Leave it, Dr. Sammelsohn, leave it! I need to speak with you this instant!”
In the passageway, he lit a cigar.
“Ah,” he sighed extravagantly. “Nicotine is a slow poison, and yet, in moments of extreme agitation, a poison can also be a balm. Would you care for one?”
“No, thank you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine anything less agreeable.
Dr. Freud blew a poisoned fume into my face. “Well, I’m done with them now, you know” — he patted his breast pocket — “and carry them only for emergencies.”
I didn’t know what to say. Was he deluded? joking? mad? The man smoked incessantly! He smoked like a badly ventilated stove! His clothes reeked of tobacco and sulfur, his teeth were a sooty grey, the pores of his face were coated with a translucent lather of nicotine. Identical to the writer’s callus on the middle finger of his right hand was a smoker’s callus on the middle finger of the left. A close inspection of his coattails and his pant legs revealed a thousand tiny burns. I’d never in the course of our acquaintance seen him without a cigar, and yet he held rigidly to the fiction of his abstinence, and until that very moment — I was shocked to realize — I’d never thought to question this fiction myself. Why, if you had asked me, I would have told you that, yes, except on the rare festive occasion or under duress to calm his jangled nerves, Dr. Freud is no longer a smoker. And so, when he told me, “Dr. Sammelsohn, there is no Ita. The woman you imagine in your fervid guilt-filled fantasies having killed is naught but a complex symptom of hysteria,” I was, for the first time in our association, inclined to disbelieve him.
“You can’t tell me I wasn’t speaking to my wife.”
“To your former wife, if indeed she is dead, and dead by her own hand, which I very much doubt.”
“But you heard her yourself!”
He clicked his tongue with a condescending clack. “You have no idea how real these delusions may seem. The appearance of a second personality is often, if not always, presented in a deceptive manner, its pathogenic material belonging to an intelligence not inferior to the patient’s normal ego, but I assure you, Dr. Sammelsohn, even were I inclined to accept as real the possibility of a dybbuk possession, I’m experienced enough in these matters to distinguish between an actual person, be she alive or dead, and an hysterically induced condition seconde. When I say that the pathogenic material behaves like a foreign body, and that its treatment proceeds, too, like the removal of a foreign body from living tissue, I assure you, Herr Doktor, the foreign body I have in mind is a tumor, and not a dybbuk!”
“But — ”
“No, no, you see, you must learn to listen to the discourse within the discourse. When Fräulein Eckstein, speaking in the voice of Ita, confesses that she conspired in her own humiliations, she has told us everything.”
“How so?”
“Well, what was Ita after?”
“Love,” I said.
“And whom does Fräulein Eckstein love?”
“Why, you, of course.”
“And what could be more humiliating than these hysterical antics she’s putting herself through. You see? Only ask yourself: can you imagine a more efficient means for keeping me at her bedside?”
“But — but — but,” I stammered, gesturing towards the wall behind which Fräulein Eckstein lay, “the things she knew … Fräulein Eckstein couldn’t have known them!”
“Oh, well, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, et cetera, et cetera, and the geographies of the mind, believe me, Dr. Sammelsohn, are stranger than any Baedeker might reveal.”
“So I didn’t kill her?” I asked meekly.
“Send a telegram home to your sisters, if you doubt me, inquiring after the health of your wife, Ita.”
“I’ve resolved to do as much already.”
“Although, I assure you, there’s no need.”
“Still.”
“And if you’re intent on this foolish gesture, may I dare to counsel you, as an older friend?”
“Yes. Please. Certainly.”
“Along with the telegram, send a get.” Here, Dr. Freud meant a rabbinic decree of divorce. “Divorce yourself from this poor girl. Remove the twin albatrosses of responsibility and guilt that hang around your neck. Stop paying interest on your father’s debt. He’s the moral bankrupt, not you. Do yourself, as well as the girl, this service, and I promise you, you shan’t regret it.”
“But of course you’re right.”
“What stuff and nonsense they’ve filled your head with.” He touched my hair affectionately. “Mine, too, of course. Oh, yes, I had a religious upbringing — strict, too — a Hebrew teacher, Hammerschlag by name, the whole bolt of cloth. But with the tools of scientific objectivity, you understand, I’ve been able to put it all behind me. And when you witness my curing of Fräulein Eckstein with the young science of psychoanalysis, you, too, will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that dybbuks, demons, ibburs, and such like, are nothing more than the fairy tales we use to enslave ourselves to our own fears. Why, religion is nothing but a prison house constructed by the inmates themselves; the clerics, the guards we appoint above ourselves. Man will do anything not to confro
nt the empty, howling wilderness that is the universe God abandoned long ago, this terrifying no-man’s land filled with chaos and desolation.”
Dr. Freud blew another choking plume of smoke into my face.
“I’ll send the telegram first thing,” I said, coughing.
He didn’t quite laugh at me, but a subtle smirk destroyed the handsome symmetry of his face. “Do,” he said, amused.
Quietly, he opened Fräulein Eckstein’s door and peered in. Standing on tiptoe, I looked over his shoulder and saw that Fräulein Eckstein had returned to her previous stuporose state: limbs rigid, mouth opened, tongue protruding.
“We’ve done enough for one evening, I think,” Dr. Freud said. “I’ll only just slip in and give her a posthypnotic suggestion that upon awakening tomorrow, she will remember nothing of what she has told us. You should get some sleep, Doktor. You look done in. And besides, it’s nearly day.”
He was correct. The once darkened windows of the hallway were beginning to glimmer with light.
CHAPTER 17
I was as good as my word. After a few hours’ sleep, I ventured out, freshly shaven, to the telegraph office, and by late morning, I’d received a reply from my sisters, confirming everything Ita had told us the night before:
SZIBOTYA, 5 MARCH 1895
DARLING BROTHER, IT IS WITH GREAT SORROW THAT WE INFORM YOU BELATEDLY OF THE DEATH OF YOUR GOOD WIFE ITA MAY GOD FORGIVE HER BY HER OWN HAND FOLLOWING YOUR WEDDING. BLESSED BE EVEN NOW THE TRUE JUDGE. FATHER HAS FORGIVEN NO ONE IN THE MATTER INCLUDING HIMSELF. WITH LOVING REGARD, YOUR SISTERS, GITL, GOLDE, RUKHL, REYZL, FEYGE, KHAYKE, & SORE DVORE
I presented the telegram to Dr. Freud at Landtmann’s that evening, where he’d invited me to dine. “I was prepared to follow your advice,” I said, “but as it turns out, a get will not be necessary.”
“No? And why is that?” he said, digging with his fork into his Spätzle.
I could almost not pronounce the words. “Because Ita is dead, I’m afraid, and by her own hand — just as Fräulein Eckstein’s dybbuk claimed — hours after our wedding. As you can see, this telegram” — I nearly waved the thing in his face — “which I received not more than a few hours ago, confirms her story in its every detail.”
Dr. Freud took the telegram and said nothing. Having read through it, he seemed to forget that it was in his hands, until, finding it there, he read it again. Finally he spoke. “Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said, a shrewd look bruising his face, “I feel confident in ruling out a practical joke on your part, but can I be as confident in doing so on the part of your sisters?”
I was appalled. “I assure you they are not people inclined towards such cruel humor.”
He was pensive. “One cannot, I suppose, in good conscience suspect the telegraph operators of such an elaborate ruse.”
“No,” I said, reaching out to retrieve the telegram — the document, one of the rare communiqués I’d received from my family in the years since I’d left Szibotya, was precious to me — but Dr. Freud ignored my hand.
“How much pleasure the retreat from reason gives us,” he said, shaking his head. “How happily we surrender to the allurements of sheer nonsense.” He gazed into the middle distance before focusing his eyes on me. “Do you realize how long this occultish business has been going on? Why, since the days of the Bible! No, only listen to this!” He shifted through the pages of his little notebook. “Both Kings Saul and Ahab were said to be possessed by evil spirits, and the Gospels several times refer to the casting out of the same. First-century Galilee seemed to have witnessed a pandemic of demonical possession. Even Josephus describes an account of a Rabbi Eleazar withdrawing the spirit of a dead sinner through the unfortunate victim’s nostrils by applying a ring that contained a magical herb to his nose.”
“He took the dybbuk out through the victim’s nostrils?”
“Yes, I wrote to Wilhelm immediately, of course.” Dr. Freud breathed on the lenses of his glasses, befogging them and wiping them clean. “Don’t be taken in, Dr. Sammelsohn. Everywhere, these stories are the same, the symptoms exactly as we find them in hysteria: frenzy, contortions, trembling; the revelations of dark crimes and scandalous tales; the exposure of local secrets. A rabbi or a healer is called in, and finally the spirit, supposedly homesick for the divine realms, agrees to depart and undergo her rightful punishments, and when she does — ah, and here is the essential thing, Dr. Sammelsohn, the essential thing that gives away the entire game — when she does, the route of her departure must be strictly negotiated, lest it wreak havoc upon the body of its captive.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How does that give the game away?”
Dr. Freud lowered his voice and made certain no one was listening to our conversation. “Well,” he said quietly, “according to all this nonsense, a spirit will often insist upon leaving via the route that causes the greatest damage to the organs: through the eye, resulting in blindness; through the mouth, with a great shattering of teeth; through the ear, deafness; or even through the throat. Often, a plate or a window will break, as proof that the spirit is departing.”
“Yes? And? So?”
“But surely you’re not so naïve! How can one read a fairy tale of this sort as anything other than a transparent attempt on the part of the pious to cover up the violence wreaked upon the poor hysteric by her so-called healers? My impression is that they raised the stakes against her, taking sexual advantage or otherwise physically harming her, until she was forced to feign a cure simply to save her own skin.”
“And the proof of that is?”
“Why, the clues are everywhere.”
“For example?”
“For example: while it’s apparently demeaning for the soul to leave through the anus — and you’re perfectly aware of the biblical prohibitions regarding anal intercourse, which would perhaps have given even our abusers pause — it’s said to be unclear whether the genitals are suitable for that purpose. In one purported case, a spirit exiting in this regard created a monstrous hemorrhage. Here, clearly, the patient was violently raped. There’s no other explanation for it. Another declared its intention of leaving the body of its captive only on the wedding night during the nuptial cohabitation. Here, the patient was obviously coerced into a marriage she herself did not want or seek. And often enough, though the cure is reported to be successful, the patient fails to survive it.”
“And so you’re suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting nothing, Dr. Sammelsohn. As a scientist, I’m stating unequivocally that these so-called dybbuk possessions were nothing but the last cry of outrage on the part of the victim against her abusers after a long history of misuse, and it’s now well known that such treatment is often the cause of psychopathology.”
“And has Fräulein Eckstein been subjected to such misuse?”
“Of that, I cannot speak to you.”
“No, of course not,” I said.
I was silent for a moment. Dr. Freud gave me a severe look. “May I be blunt with you, Dr. Sammelsohn?”
“Go on,” I said.
He leaned in towards me. “No, it’s only that I’m wondering if there isn’t some reason that you might prefer it if Fräulein Eckstein’s case were not one of hysteria, but indeed rather one of demonical possession.”
“On the contrary!” I sputtered. “I have every reason to hope otherwise!”
“Yes, I understand that, and yet you appear constantly to be advocating against that very hope.”
“Well …” I said to no purpose.
“When one would imagine, given the circumstances, that you’d be clutching at any of the many scientific straws I’m constantly providing you.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “it’s … mysterious … quite, even to myself.”
“I can only speculate, of course,” Dr. Freud said, “but I imagine, if we probed deeply, we’d find buried beneath this refusal of yours to submit to reason a long-cherished childhood wish. When reason becomes an impedimen
t to pleasure, I think you’ll find that it’s the first thing a man throws overboard.”
He paid the check and began gathering up his notes.
“In any case,” he said, “I hope to make an end of this wretched case tonight.”
AT THE SANATORIUM, following her bran bath, Dr. Freud pressed his hand against Fräulein Eckstein’s forehead and, hypnotizing her, commanded Ita to speak. “Frau Sammelsohn,” he summoned her. Though I’d resolved, out of scientific scruple, to banish my belief in the authenticity of Fräulein Eckstein’s condition seconde, Dr. Freud’s addressing her by this name continued to embarrass me, reminding me, as it did, of the many ways in which I’d harmed Ita while she was yet alive. Amid a rippling of neuralgic facial tics, Ita swam to the surface of the pond, so to speak, animating Fräulein Eckstein’s face. She looked like a sleeper waking, uncertain where she was. Seeing Dr. Freud, she scowled however, and things took an ugly turn.
“Oh, Yankl,” she cried, “what does this horrid man want from me now?”
“Good evening, madam,” Dr. Freud said.
She placed a hand distractedly upon her forehead. “I can barely remember half of what we talked about last night! He’s making me forget things! He’s forcing me to forget you, Yankl!”
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