A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “Forgive me, Dr. Sammelsohn,” said, “if I suggest that you’re not thinking clearly.”

  “No, I assumed not,” I said, pointing to my head, happy to have my self-diagnosis of madness confirmed. That it had been confirmed by a figure who was himself an element of my delusion did not strike me as ironical as it perhaps should have.

  “No. Why else would we be here, he means,” said.

  Looking back and forth between the two, I shrugged. “I have no idea truly.”

  “It’s said.

  “Ita?” I said.

  “She’s been reborn,” said.

  Reborn? Ita? These words chilled me to the bone. Still, I supposed it made a kind of sense. Hadn’t the three of them always been mixed up together?

  “Or rather reborn again, we should say.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s right,” said. “You met her once before in Paris, I believe.”

  “Gaston,” whispered, and as he pronounced the name, I once again saw the poor unfortunate being pummeled to death by Monsieur Gajewski.

  I blushed at the memory. “I thought that was Ita. However, I wasn’t certain, you see.”

  “No, of course not,” said.

  “The entire system works on just that very principle of doubt,” explained.

  “It’s not that. Rather, it’s the fact that …” I took a moment and looked at my hands resting on my knees. “No, it’s just that Gaston seemed, I have to say, a little too much like the Ita I once knew, that we all knew, in fact: violent, vindictive, spiteful, addicted, as I believe you once told me, to short lives and unhappy deaths.”

  shrugged. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Whereas” — I couldn’t help shaking my finger at them — “I seem to recall striking a bargain with the two of you.”

  “A bargain?” said, squinting myopically behind his thick glasses.

  “A bargain?” swallowed his laughter. “Do you recall making any bargains, brother?”

  “A bargain?” repeated.

  I hesitated, uncertain how one approaches an angelic being with a grievance, but my anger had emboldened me, and so I persisted. “A bargain indeed! As I recall, you two made me a promise. You promised me that if I coerced Ita into abandoning Fräulein Eckstein’s body and submitting to your authority, you’d see to it that she was remanded to the Highest of Heavens, her soul restored to its original purity.”

  “Oh, yes, that bargain.” tutted his tongue. “Now, of course, I remember.”

  “Well, you kept your part of it, at least,” said.

  “As did we, as we did,” reassured me.

  “No, it’s true, Dr. Sammelsohn. My fellows and I never laid so much as a glove on her, though many of the lads were eager to do so, although not necessarily a glove, if you understand my meaning.”

  “As a matter of celestial record, was not required to undergo the usual purifying torments, which never had much effect on her anyway.”

  “He says that as though our methods don’t work nearly one hundred percent of the time. They do, Dr. Sammelsohn. Justice is justice, though

  no one said it would be pretty.”

  “And yet,” I felt compelled to belabor the point, “there was Ita, alive again and loose on the streets of Paris, creating mischief, as though she hadn’t progressed one jot in spiritual refinement.”

  The two figures — I cannot call them men, though in every wise they resembled men — exchanged complicated looks. fiddled with his truncheon. coughed into his fist.

  “We were hoping this wouldn’t come up.”

  “Wouldn’t come up!”

  “Please, Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t make more of this than it is.”

  cleared his throat. “At the end of the process, was asked to perform a small favor, that’s all.”

  “A favor?”

  “A small, simple favor.”

  “Which was?”

  “Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn!” sighed. “Must we go into all that?”

  explained: “To use her God-given talents for mischief and destruction one final time, after which the sins accumulated during all her previous lives would be forgiven and, in her next life, she would be free to start anew.”

  “Her expertise was required,” said.

  “Her expertise?”

  “For mischief and destruction, as we’ve said.”

  “And what exactly was it that Heaven needed her to destroy?” I said, stunned by this piece of news.

  The two brothers looked at each other.

  “Tell me,” I insisted.

  “Tell him,” said, dropping his head.

  “Me? Why should it be me? It was your idea.”

  “You’re the so-called good angel!”

  “Oh, please! Do you know how much harder it is to do the good, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

  “Ach, not this again!” said, crossing his broad arms against his chest. “Here we go again!”

  “Evil is simple, easy,” said.

  “Spoken like a true amateur!”

  “A man can destroy in a morning what has taken centuries to build: cities, civilizations, cultures.”

  “These arguments are so tedious!”

  “Certainly, there’s more good than evil in the world — otherwise nothing could endure — but it’s only a little more, a fraction at best, if even that.”

  “And Esperanto?” I said, suddenly fearing I understood him too well. “How did Esperanto fit into this balance?”

  “Oh, well, that’s just it, you see,” said unhappily.

  wagged his thick finger at me. “That Dr. Zamenhof of yours got just a little too close for comfort, I must say. One really can’t force the hand of the Messiah, Dr. Sammelsohn. Everyone knows this.”

  “What … what are you saying?” I sputtered. “That Ita, working on behalf of Heaven, intentionally destroyed the Esperanto movement in order to … to … to what? … to delay the coming of the Messiah?”

  “Oh, no, not at all! Not at all!” said, but then he immediately corrected himself: “Well, actually, I suppose that’s exactly it.”

  “We couldn’t rely on Professor Couturat to do the job alone, although, as it turned out, he succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

  “But-but-but,” I stammered, “why on earth would Heaven wish to delay the coming of the Messiah?”

  “Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t ask us that please,” said.

  “We don’t make the rules.”

  “No, we simply carry them out.”

  “In other words,” said in German, giving his brother an amused look and straining to finish his sentence before laughter choked it off, “we were only following orders!”

  (For reasons I wouldn’t understand for many years, and burst out laughing, after which drying his eyes on his sleeve, said, was right. All the emotions in a human body! Whoever thought it!”)

  “But it wasn’t only on that Parisian street,” told me.

  “Or didn’t you recognize Zusha the Amalekite?”

  “In the guise of Master Gajewski!”

  “And your own father!”

  “In the guise of the dog.”

  “A new entry for Dr. Freud’s chart!”

  “Which, thank Heaven, he burned.”

  I stared at the two of them, the German officer and the Jewish professor. No, it’s definitive, I thought. I’m definitely hallucinating.

  “We never denied it, we never denied that,” said.

  “That snarling wolfhound was my father?”

  They both affirmed this terrible fact with a shrug.

  “But I didn’t even pet him!” I exclaimed, feeling suddenly very glum.

  “No, well, why would you have? He’d only have bitten your hand.”

  “Listen to me, Doctor,” said. was no neophyte. She’d been through the whirling vortex of lives nearly a hundred times before. She understood exactly what she was agreeing to.”

  “Oh, yes! This was hardly first time at the ball.”

  “And though she agreed to our r
equest, it wasn’t without asking for a favor of her own in return.”

  “One can do that?” I exclaimed.

  shrugged unhappily. “Regrettably, things have loosened up over the course of the last five hundred years or so.”

  “Not one of my favorite topics,” growled.

  “Nor mine.”

  “And this favor?” I said. “What exactly was it?”

  “Oh, no, you don’t want to know that, Dr. Sammelsohn, believe me.”

  “But I do!”

  “I don’t think you do, Dr. Sammelsohn,” said, and he began to beat his truncheon against the meat of his palm and became so menacing, I had no choice but to drop the matter.

  “In any case,” said, trying to put a good face on things, “we’re not at liberty to reveal it to you.”

  “And yet,” lifted his two arms in the air, “is our being here not miracle enough for you, Dr. Sammelsohn? I mean, here we all are again!”

  “Yes! All of us together again!”

  “Take me to her,” I said.

  “Naturally,” said.

  “Actually,” purred, “we assumed that would have been your first request.”

  “I’M TELLING YOU, Dr. Sammelsohn,” peered at me through his thick glasses, “you won’t even recognize her.”

  “But of course, he wouldn’t recognize her anyway, would he?” said.

  “No, that’s true. Physically, she’s nothing like herself, but internally, she’s also changed.”

  We were sitting on a park bench in a square near the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka, keeping track of the time on his watch. “Any minute now, any minute now,” he said.

  “I know you don’t believe us, Dr. Sammelsohn, but your love has transformed her.”

  “My love!” I could only scoff. “Gentlemen, surely you’re mocking me. When I review my life, my principal regret is that Zusha the Amalekite didn’t succeed in strangling Ita with his shoestring!”

  shrugged. “Fine. Regret it. It wouldn’t have done you any good. She’d only have been reborn again.”

  “Correct.”

  “And again.”

  “We don’t call them gilgulim for nothing.” He made a circular motion with his hand.

  I gathered my collars against the cold and pulled my hat brim down. Was there any point in allowing myself to be hoodwinked by these two — what were they even? — phantoms? angels? psychoid disturbances? Did I even wish to see Ita again? It was a question I hadn’t even bothered asking myself in the wild tumult of events. Why would I want to see her? She’d been a disaster from first to last. As herself, she’d wrecked my childhood; as a dybbuk, she’d destroyed my romance with Fräulein Eckstein; as a miserable street urchin, she’d sabotaged my marriage to Loë while bringing down the Esperanto movement and (if the angels were to be believed) delaying the arrival of the Messiah! What possible good could come from meeting her in a fourth incarnation even if, as and assured me now, she’d repented of her evil ways?

  “No, I’ve had enough of this!” I cried. “I refuse to be made a fool of by my own hallucinations!” I began to stand, but thudded the back of his fist against my chest and forced me back onto the park bench.

  “Look!” he said. “There she is now!” He pointed to a woman who was leaving an apartment house across the way. She stood at the top of the building’s exterior stairs, buttoning her coat before descending to the sidewalk. She looked in both directions at the curb before committing to the street, as the usual ghetto traffic, more rickshaws than cars by that time, sped by.

  “Ah.” nodded gently. “I’d forgotten how lovely she’s become.” gave him a stern look. “What’s happening to you here, brother?”

  “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “Don’t let this little masquerade of ours go to your head.”

  I paid their argument little mind. My attention was riveted on the young woman. She wore a white medical smock beneath her winter coat and was carrying a black medical bag.

  “The limp” — whispering, directed my attention to her irregular gait — “has carried over, you see.”

  “As we told you,” whispered in my other ear, “she’s a doctor.”

  “And what does she do — murder her patients?”

  “No, Heaven forbid!” exclaimed. “She’s completely reformed herself, Dr. Sammelsohn! How many times must we tell you that?”

  I nearly got up to greet the woman, but she walked right past us, paying no attention to me or to my companions.

  “Oh, this is all nonsense!” I cried. Nevertheless, with the angels trailing behind me, I followed her for a block, keeping a respectable distance between us. was correct: despite the brutality of the times and the wasting effect it was having upon all of us, despite the limp, which made of her walking an asymmetrical affair, she moved with a pleasing femininity. As I reduced the distance between us, I could see that beneath her hat, her hair was sensibly pinned and, despite her youth, streaked with grey.

  First she and then I rounded a corner and simultaneously we caught sight of a soldier. The young doktershe turned around so quickly, she was walking straight towards me or (why not give in to the madness?) straight towards the three of us. In fact, she nearly walked into me, and as she did, she eyed me, I thought, with an odd flash of recognition. Having confirmed on closer inspection that she did not know me after all, she shook her head, seeming quite literally to be shaking off the impression.

  “Doktershe,” I said, greeting her with a tip of my hat.

  “Ah! Ah, ha! Dr. Sammelsohn, did you see? Did you see that?” said, as the young woman moved past us and disappeared into the crowd.

  “See what?”

  “The way she looked at you! How she seemed to recognize you!”

  “Oh, nonsense!”

  “What’s nonsensical about it?” he said.

  “What isn’t nonsensical about it? Must I elaborate? To begin with, and I hate to keep harping on this, but there’s no way for me to know whether you two are even real!”

  “As we,” attempted to keep an even tone, masking his exasperation with me, his dullest student, “have, in all fairness, admitted to you.”

  “Why he must keep throwing it in our faces, brother! That’s what I’d like to know. And why must he lump us in together? After all, perhaps you’re a hallucination but I’m not.”

  seemed appalled by the idea. “Right, right! I suppose if only one of us were real, it would have to be you.”

  pointed his chin at me. “What even makes him think he’s real? Perhaps we’re hallucinating you, Dr. Sammelsohn, or did you never think of that?”

  “Even if you weren’t hallucinations,” I persisted, nearly shouting at them, “you could simply pick out any woman from a crowd and tell me she was Ita.”

  “And what possible motive would we have for doing that?” said.

  “No, the way she studied you, Dr. Sammelsohn! You saw it. I know you saw it. That flare of recognition!”

  “He’s right,” said. “Why would she recognize him? It makes no sense at all.”

  “Oh, you two are completely incorrigible!” I threw up my hands. “I don’t know what I saw. I only know what you’re trying to convince me I saw. And in any case” — I looked at my watch — “I’m late for an appointment.”

  “With the rebbe?”

  “Yes, with the rebbe! And whatever you do, please do not follow me there.”

  CHAPTER 6

  But of course they did. They followed me everywhere. Despite my doubts concerning their materiality, I ran into them at every turn, especially who, with his band of punitive angels, descended upon the ghetto periodically, dressed in their black leathers, with their truncheons and their pistols and their whips. Their violence revolted me. However, far worse was the fact that whenever finished whatever grim task he was overseeing — pistol-whipping an old man; shooting a child he’d caught smuggling — he’d call out to me from across the square with a wave of his broad arm. “Hoi, Dr. Sammelsohn! A good af
ternoon to you, sir!”

  It was all I could do to pull my collars up and pretend I didn’t know him.

  “Despite everything, I love this job,” he said one day after a particularly unpleasant episode, joining us at the Café Leszno. “There’s nothing quite like a little murder and mayhem to stir a soul to repentance.”

  Picking up my knife, he used it to clean away the blood from under his fingernails.

  “Brother,” said, “can’t we talk about something other than your work for a change?”

  “Like what? Yours? Don’t make me yawn! But no, I suppose you’re right.” He lowered his jowly cheek into his palm and looked at me. “I keep forgetting I’m not among specialists here, as I am with my gang.”

  “Must be nice having an army,” said wistfully.

  “To tell you the truth,” said, “I don’t think you could handle the responsibility.”

  As opposed to specialized in the miraculous rescue. More than once, I’d seen him pulling some poor soul out of harm’s way, pushing him from a building moments before the Jewish police arrived, or routing him away from a trap. Once I even saw him unloading a line of soldiers’ guns right behind their backs. He made certain ammunition found its way to the underground, and he performed all these tasks with such a light and gentle hand that many of the recipients of his charities had no idea he’d come to their aid.

  As for Ita — or for the woman the angels insisted was Ita — I’d encounter her periodically, limping through the streets in her white medical smock, and the odd happiness I’d felt at seeing her again, at discovering that she was still alive, never failed to fill me with a blushing sense of confusion.

  The angels brought her up continually. Indeed, no conversation could proceed between us, it seemed, without her being mentioned at least once. More often, she formed the whole of our conversation. I refused to demonstrate any interest in her person before the two of them, but this didn’t stop them. They’d pretend to forget that I could hear them and discuss some secret something or other in front of me until my curiosity was piqued. Perhaps it was all part of the byzantine protocol of the Heavenly Court for which they worked. Perhaps a mortal must ask for information before the Angelics may give it to him. I had no idea. And at times, I was too heartsick to even wonder about it.