A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “There’s no other explanation for it, is there?”

  Someone nearby shushed us.

  “The spirit knows of me?” the rector was saying.

  Fraŭlino Zinger seemed to listen to the invisible presence as though she were taking dictation. “Here,” she finally said, “where time does not bind us, and there is no future and no past, the good professor’s book L’avenir des sciences psychiques is widely admired and even more widely discussed.”

  Rector Boirac seemed openly pleased with this late-breaking news from the other world. “Remarkable!” he exclaimed. “The book is only half-begun and sitting, still in drafts, in the top drawer of my desk back home!”

  (He wouldn’t, in fact, publish it for another twelve years.)

  “Well, here, it’s all the rage,” fraŭlino Zinger told him.

  “Oh, this is nonsense! These two have clearly rehearsed all this!” I said.

  “Ŝa, Kaĉjo!” fraŭlino Loë whispered, tapping me on the knees.

  Though seemingly wildly flattered, Rector Boirac was ever the cautious technician. “And how does the spirit propose to make itself known to us?”

  Fraŭlino Zinger held another silent conference with her invisible correspondent. Finally she said, “The spirit asks that I make my body available to her.”

  Rector Boirac grunted. “It would be better if I availed my own body for that purpose” — he fretted over the issue — “though I’m reluctant to surrender the high tower of scientific objectivity. Will the spirit assure us no harm will come to the fraŭlino through this agreement?”

  “The spirit promises,” fraŭlino Zinger said, “although she says it will exhaust me.”

  “And fraŭlino Zinger, are you willing?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Well then,” Rector Boirac said, “I suppose I agree as well.”

  With that, fraŭlino Zinger stood and laced her hands in front of her diaphragm. “The spirit will inhabit my body as a hand inhabits a glove, using my throat and my voice but for her own purposes.” She stood firmly on the balls of her feet; and though she was blindfolded, her face, still behind the black cloth, seemed to transform.

  “There is someone here in the room with us tonight,” the fraŭlino said, in a voice not quite her own.

  “Someone?” Rector Boirac inquired.

  “A man who has forgotten a promise he once made.”

  “To you, Spirit?”

  “Indeed, to me.”

  A queer feeling passed through me; I won’t deny that. fraŭlino Loë’s brow beetled, and I could feel her peering into my face, delighted by the show. Without returning her look, I manufactured a small frown meant to convey my complete and utter incomprehension at the turn the proceedings had taken.

  “And will you identify this man, Spirit?”

  “Oh, there’s no need of that. He knows who he is.”

  “Ah,” Rector Boirac said. “Naturally, naturally.”

  Blinded by the black kerchief, fraŭlino Zinger nevertheless seemed to peer into the crowd. “He’s here. There.” She pointed with her chin. “Sitting with his whore.”

  The audience, gasping collectively at this pronouncement, began to search within itself for the guilty party.

  “Don’t pretend to her that you don’t know what I’m talking about,” the spirit cried.

  Oh dear, I thought.

  Fraŭlino Zinger’s movements seemed delayed, slightly staggered, as though the impulse behind each was being mediated through the brain of a second being. “I only want what was promised me. He told me he loved me. And he promised he’d wait for me, and now I’m alive again!”

  “Alive again?” Rector Boirac asked, maniacally scribbling notes.

  “Oh, the poor thing!” fraŭlino Loë whispered to me.

  “Is this making sense to anyone?” Rector Boirac asked.

  No one answered him, naturally, and before I quite realized what I was doing, I had stood.

  “Rector Boirac,” I announced to the room in general, trying to seem as patently unmanned as I could, “I have no idea what any of this means, nor who this spirit, if spirit she is, might be. But as a medical man, I must tell you that the fraŭlino appears to be in the grip of some terrible hysteria, and I must advise putting an end to this demonstration before she is harmed. I fear that the strain might prove injurious to her health.”

  I hated to sabotage the explorations of an honest researcher, and I presumed I could explain everything to him later on in private, but at the time, I was a wreck, fearing what might next be said in fraŭlino Loë’s presence.

  “Don’t you dare touch me!” fraŭlino Zinger screamed the moment Rector Boirac took a step towards her. “Dr. Sammelsohn!” she sneered. “You don’t think I know what happened on the beach the other night, but I do! And I’ll be happy to gossip about it all night long!”

  “Kaĉjo!” fraŭlino Loë whispered, clutching my hand.

  “Spirit!” I said fiercely. “Do not add slander to the list of your sins while you’re yet burning in Gehenna!”

  “But I’m not in Gehenna!” she wailed. “Thanks to my husband’s goodness, as I’m trying to explain to you, I was spared the fires of Gehenna, and now I’ve been reborn!” Seeming to peer over her shoulder, fraŭlino Zinger suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, no! They’re coming! I have to get off the line.”

  “Line?” Rector Boirac squinted.

  “None of this is allowed,” she told him. “Listen to me, husband,” she called generally to the room. “Meet me tomorrow night at midnight in the ballroom on the mezzanine and I’ll explain everything to you there! The fraŭlino’s getting too weak! I can’t hold on to her.”

  “Ita, wait!” I cried, and for a moment, everything was quiet, and in that silence, I heard only one sound: fraŭlino Loë saying, “Ita?”

  As fraŭlino Zinger crumbled into a heap upon the floor, half the room ran to her, while the other half, in search of a credible explanation, turned to me.

  “Husband!” Rector Boirac suddenly exclaimed, as though Ita were now using his throat as a megaphone. “Don’t forget — you pledged yourself to me!”

  IT WASN’T EASY, but no matter how much fraŭlino Loë needled me about Who is this Ita? or How did fraŭlino Zinger know those things about you? about us?, I feigned absolute and total incomprehension. I imagined myself a soldier captured by a cruel enemy, who would stop at nothing to break the truth out of him.

  “No, I have to say I’m as confounded by it as you are, my darling. Flummoxed, really. In the cold rational light of day, none of it seems real.”

  “And did you ever know someone called Ita?”

  “No. Well, yes, I suppose, I did. Once.”

  “Oh, Kaĉjo!” She surrendered to tears.

  “But no, it was nothing like that! No, no! She was only a poor idiot girl in our town — ”

  “A poor idiot girl?”

  “Yes, who could barely speak.”

  Having cracked under fraŭlino Loë’s line of questioning, my new strategy was to tell her as much of the truth as I needed to in order to keep her away from the rest of it.

  “She simply repeated the last words anyone said to her.”

  “Oh, how awful!” fraŭlino Loë stirred her coffee.

  “Yes, her grandfather had tried to strangle her with a shoestring after she was born, or so the story goes, and this resulted in some sort of permanent damage to her brain. Both my parents were very kind to her, as was my entire family, actually. My father even tried to find a husband for her, but of course, that proved a total disaster.”

  “Of course.”

  “Precisely.”

  Taking a sip of her café au lait, fraŭlino Loë stared out the café window towards the beach. As she swallowed, I watched the muscles of her throat working. She really was an extraordinarily good-looking woman. Her brow creased, and she pierced me with a hard look. “But how is it then that you thought you recognized her voice?” she said.

  “Sorry?” I said, pre
tending not to hear her over the din of the espresso machines.

  “If,” she reiterated, “when you knew her, she could only repeat what other people said to her, how is it you thought you recognized her voice, during Rector Boirac’s presentation, when she was speaking in full sentences? You called her by name, I thought.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what makes it impossible upon further reflection. It couldn’t have been the Ita I knew at all. Which makes me shudder to imagine that someone was watching us on the beach the other night.”

  “Oh God! But who? fraŭlino Zinger, do you think?”

  “Or Boirac, more likely.”

  “It’s too horrible to contemplate!”

  “I know, my darling, I know.”

  I’d gotten myself into a terrible quandary. fraŭlino Loë sensed — correctly, I might add — that I was concealing something from her, most likely an affair with the not unattractive fraŭlino Zinger, conducted in the early days of the congress before she and I had reconciled. (Certainly, as an explanation, an affair with a beautiful Esperantistino made more sense than did the transmigration of my long-dead wife inside her handsome body. It wasn’t inconceivable that a jealous fraŭlino Zinger might have followed us to the beach, observed our lovemaking, and in a fit of spleen announced our affair to the world.) Regrettably, however, although fraŭlino Loë’s suspicion about fraŭlino Zinger kept her well away from the truth, it opened an emotional chasm between us. Having created this chasm, all I wanted to do now was leap across it and confess everything to her, the story of my marriage to Ita, her suicide, her reappearance in Dr. Freud’s consulting rooms, et cetera, et cetera, but the thought of fraŭlino Loë’s father prevented me from doing so. His face seemed to hover in the air between us, and I could only see myself as I appeared to him, a credulous Galitsyaner, an Ostjude, a demon-riddled Jew from the Near Orient. If fraŭlino Bernfeld came to see me in this way as well, the wedding, I knew, would be off; and while all I wanted was to prevent that from happening, I also wondered if I weren’t making a terrible mistake. Ita obviously possessed a devastating and primitive attraction for me, as I apparently did for her; and if Dr. Freud were correct (before he’d suppressed his original theories) we’d been chasing each other for millennia; and unless I imagined it all (as he now maintained), I had pledged myself to her, although (as I continued to insist with pharisaical obstinacy) not before two kosher witnesses.

  Still, who, given the choice between a beautiful, penetratingly intelligent, and idealistic woman of astounding physical passion and a vindictive murderous shrew, hesitates even for a moment — especially when the former is alive and the latter less so — except a credulous Galitsyaner?

  The way forward seemed clear, and yet that clarity didn’t prevent me from leaving the warmth of fraŭlino Loë’s bed the following night on the pretext of sneaking back into my own rooms as I always (although usually much later) did, so that I might awaken in my own bed and appear to all the world as though I’d slept there.

  Instead, I made a quick and carpet-quieted dash down the hallway to the stairs and into the lobby, where I innocently slowed my pace before dashing up the opposite staircase to the mezzanine. While in the lobby, I nodded, with a counterfeit nonchalance, to the deskman who, with one cheek pressed against his fist, was sleepily reading through Dr. Zamenhof’s Dua Libro.

  Only one of the ballroom’s many doors, the last one I tried in fact, was unlocked and, as I slipped through it and it closed behind me, the light from the lamps in the hallways was eclipsed.

  “Hello?” I called out quietly into the darkness, as a clock in the corner of the room struck twelve. “Anybody here?”

  The night sky, through the tall windows, offered the barest of light, and I was on the point of searching through my pockets for a match when I felt a presence behind me. An instant later, a pool of candlelight made a puddle at my feet. Before I could turn around to face whoever was behind me, a hand was laid upon my shoulder and, though I might have anticipated it, I nearly jumped out of my clothes with fright.

  “Ho, Dr. Sammelsohn,” fraŭlino Zinger said, for it was she, as I saw when I turned at last to face my interlocutor. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  With one hand, she held a candlestick before her breast — the flame illuminated her face from below in a striking chiaroscuro — and with her other hand, she reached out to calm me. I must confess: the intimacy of the moment, the sensation of her flesh against mine, the way the light exaggerated the curve of her bosom, our whispered conversation, her eyes searching mine over the flame of her candle, made me nearly forget my purpose in coming here, or rather nearly made me substitute a second purpose for the first. Also, her face, no longer blindfolded, was lovelier than I recalled.

  “I wasn’t certain anyone would be here,” she whispered. “I almost didn’t come myself. It all feels a bit strange and otherworldly, doesn’t it?”

  “Indeed, it does, fraŭlino,” I said with a gentle laugh.

  “And the other night exhausted me. I slept through an entire day of the congress today, but I was willing to do it all again.”

  “And why is that, fraŭlino?”

  She shrugged her pretty shoulder. “For the sake of love, I suppose. Shall we sit here?”

  She took me by the hand to one of the tables along the dance floor, and we sat with our chairs nearer to each other’s than propriety allowed. The fraŭlino’s candle was the only true light in the room, and we were forced to huddle near it. I peered nervously into the blinding darkness surrounding us, wondering if anyone were hiding in the gloom. However, I seemed to be the only man fool enough, the only fool man enough, to have answered the spirit’s call. As I glanced past the candlelight at the fraŭlino’s delicate face — on the point of speaking, she had lowered her head modestly and wet her lips — I wondered if the story I’d invented weren’t true. Perhaps a jealous fraŭlino Zinger had contrived last night’s performance and tonight’s séance (for that is what I felt certain we were doing here) as a way of stealing me from her rival. Upon more sober reflection, a caper like this seemed as impossible to have planned as to pull off.

  “I must say, Dr. Sammelsohn, all this is very strange to me, and I don’t know if it will make any sense to you, either. However, the spirit who used my body last night — if that is indeed what happened — asked me to assist her in delivering a message to whoever arrived here this evening.”

  I nodded and swallowed nervously.

  “She said that this man would understand everything.”

  “I can’t say that I will, fraŭlino, but I will try.”

  “She’s near,” the fraŭlino said, “but too weak to speak. Last night almost did her in, she says.”

  “Ah,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “But she asks if I might touch you?”

  “I suppose that will be all right,” I said, “if it will help bring this episode to a definitive conclusion.”

  Fraŭlino Zinger shyly raised her hand. She hesitated before placing it on my cheek, which she lightly stroked. I looked into her face and was moved by the expression of tenderness I found there. She sighed and seemed to relax a bit. She drew her attention inward. Once again, as on the evening before, she seemed to be listening to a voice I couldn’t hear, aware of a presence I couldn’t see. Finally, she said, “The spirit is speaking to me now, and she asks me to tell you that you’re looking quite well and also very handsome.” fraŭlino Zinger nodded. “Tak tak,” she said in Polish, though clearly not to me. “I will. Yes, I will.” To me, she said, “The spirit apologizes for her rudeness yesterday. Your friend seems to be taking good care of you, and she’s happy for that, she says, though of course, she couldn’t help her jealous feelings. She says you’ll understand that.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And she regrets her unseemly behavior.”

  “I assure her there’s no need to apologize.”

  “May I hold your hand, Dr. Sammelsohn.”
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br />   “Fraŭlino,” I demurred, “I’m not certain that would be — ”

  “It will aid in the connection.”

  “Well, certainly then.”

  The fraŭlino took my hand in both of hers. She caressed my palm with her fingers, before bringing it to her lips.

  “Fraŭlino,” I remonstrated with her.

  She nodded, seeming to concede the appropriateness of the rebuke, and she closed her eyes. Oddly, I could feel her hand growing first cold, then warm.

  “Are you all right, fraŭlino?”

  “The spirit wants you to know that she has been reborn.”

  “Yes, she has already mentioned that.”

  “And that she will see you in Paris.”

  I almost laughed. “But I have no plans to return to Paris, fraŭlino.”

  “It will be difficult, she says, but she will make herself known to you there.”

  I shrugged. I could see there was no use in arguing the point.

  “In Paris, she will return to you, her dear husband, the love that you gave her in Vienna and that has so transformed her.”

  “But how will I know her, fraŭlino? Ask her that.”

  “Only …”

  “Yes?”

  Fraŭlino Zinger’s voice darkened, and its tone became aggressive with threats. In fact, she glared at me, her face a sneer.

  “Only do not marry that whore, Yankl! I forbid it!”

  “Ita?” I said, looking into the fraŭlino’s fiery gaze. “Is … is that you?”

  “I’m warning you!” she said, pointing at me with her finger. “You know I have a temper, Yankl. Don’t provoke me! Or I won’t be held accountable for my actions!”

  “Ita, that’s sufficient,” I said.

  We sat for a moment in silence. Someone outside in the passageway coughed.

  “Fraŭlino?” I said softly. “Are … are you all right?”

  She cried out, “Kiss me, Yankl! I haven’t much time here.”

  The fraŭlino threw herself upon me, though that justifies my behavior not at all, and I’m afraid the kiss we shared grew more passionate than either of us intended. I was kissing her neck when, with a sudden in-breath of air, she bolted upright, her spine rigidly straight, and collapsed into my arms, unconscious.