by Elie Wiesel
His question disconcerts me. How can I elude it? It impinges upon a secret area of my being. I say to myself: The man is clever. Now, all of a sudden, he's the therapist and I'm the patient. And I have to come up with an answer, if only so I won't lose face.
“I look at patients and I say to myself that they don't know my fear; as to theirs, perhaps they're hiding it by integrating it into their fragmented, if not filched, lives. For them, everything makes sense, whereas the world is in a thousand pieces. They live in an environment of organized, structured madness, frozen in mental acrobatics. I listen to them and I say to myself: They have ready-made answers; for me, they become questions again. In this way, by following my thought processes, unconsciously I get rid of my fear.”
Doriel gazes at me intently. His smile, icy from the beginning, fades. There is a solemn, pained look in his eyes. I must make an effort not to be moved.
“Thank you,” he says in a low voice, his head slightly bowed. “Thank you for your candor. Your honesty in playing the game inspires trust. Now, I'll do the same. Listen, in the Orient, my ascetic friend had said: ‘When you reach your sixties, you'll be in great danger somewhere, far from here; call me and I'll come to your rescue.’ Well, the appointment he gave me is now. I called him and he didn't come. What should I do, Doctor? I wrote to him and he didn't answer. Is he still alive? Free or locked up again?”
Unfortunately we have only three minutes left. And the schedule, as Uncle Sigmund said, is immutable, hallowed, sacred.
That evening, during dinner, I can't help bringing up the subject again, which preoccupies me more and more. I tell Martin that there's something important about my patient's behavior that escapes me. True, the afternoon session was rather encouraging, but I sense he resents me; he treats me with animosity, whereas with other people he must be much more docile, generous, and even warm. On the one hand, he's paying me, so he must trust me. On the other, he gets irritated, loses his temper, and is always watching me, judging me, and complaining bitterly. Why this special, strange attitude on his part?
“You're asking me? What can I tell you, since I've never seen the fellow?” says Martin.
“That's just it. Because you're—how can I put it—on the sidelines, you might have a more objective view of the situation.”
“Well, you want me to make a guess?”
“Go ahead.”
“In my opinion, he's stricter and harsher with you precisely because he's frightened.”
“Frightened? Of what? Of whom?”
“Of you. Frightened you might uncover the true nature of his illness, its true roots.”
4
As he wanders down the streets in no rush to get home, Doriel tries to get a better understanding of his own state of mind. Whom can he confide in? His thoughts go back to the Orient, back to his old friend. There was someone he could confide in. Why does this woman, Thérèse Goldschmidt, arouse such strong but ambiguous feelings in him? Will he really end up having heart-to-heart talks with her? What is it about her that makes him want to contradict everything she says? Subconsciously, does he admire or desire her? She isn't the most beautiful or most brilliant woman he's ever met or seen. Besides, she's married and clearly in love with her librarian husband. Is it so he could have regrets about his bachelor life that, of all the therapists listed in the medical directory, he ended up with a married woman with whom he could fall in love?
From far away, his friend in the Orient, always present, affectionate but tactful, would have answered him without a moment's hesitation. “Brother, you've done a lot of things in your life. Some have made you wiser, others more rebellious. At times you dreamed of rising up to the heavens; at other times you were ready to bury yourself in the darkness. Sometimes you wanted to live in the future and sometimes in the past, sometimes immersed in the misfortune of disappointed flirtation, sometimes in the happiness of a rare true love. What can I say, brother, sometimes you confuse everything. And so you've forgotten the most important thing: For a man who wants to quench his thirst at the spring, aren't intelligence and passion frauds? For fulfillment, whether in ecstasy or a fall, man must cling to the present. Though fleeting, the instant holds its own eternity, just as love and even desire conceive their own absolute. If man aspires to transform being and time, and their interrelationships, he will end up adopting Platonic thought, which ultimately leads him away from his destiny, leaving him in the undefined, misty, cluttered realm of decline, followed by insanity. In this ambiguous universe, full of pitfalls and boasts, strength lies in the act of creating one's own lucidity and mastering one's own truth. The person who loves, who creates or re-creates if only for a split second, has already won a victory over the absurdity of fate.”
Doriel imagines his friend in his great wisdom: the friend breaks off, holds his breath, and glances at him with a smile, as though advising him to follow his example. “You will say to me: And what about the future in all this? It exists, brother, of course it exists, but as a threat. Disease is a prison, old age a humiliation, and death a defeat. These are things I know about: I had happy parents, I told you about them; their bliss was the envy of the village. What I didn't tell you was that they died in an epidemic that devastated the region. As for my school friends, most of them were killed in the war. For years, I lived in anger; I kept railing against the injustice of fate and of men. Then, with a great master as my guide, I understood we were given lips not just to cry out but also to sing and kiss. To brave the wrath of the gods by saying: You want to prevent me from experiencing happiness. Well, I'll bite into it with gusto! There: faced with suffering, that's the only valid response. To reject joy under the pretext that it has no right to exist and can only be imperfect would be, for me, surrendering right at the start.”
Doriel would tell him that one is defeated well before the start; he would say that being born is more like exile than liberation . No sooner do you arrive with the plan of asserting yourself in an indifferent world than it is already too late.
“Too late for whom? For the infant maybe, but not for his parents. Or his own future children. You're so eager to give a meaning to destiny that you'll end up thinking you're destiny or, worse, not allowing destiny to do its job. That's the mistake! You can be the friend of your fellow man or his enemy, but you can't be his destiny. He carries his destiny within himself.”
Wise words, not entirely devoid of sense and humanism. As he thinks about it, Doriel pulls himself together. He remembers that, back in the Orient, he hid something from his friend who was so poor. He did not tell him about his wealth.
5
EXCERPTS FROM DR. THéRèSE GOLDSCHMIDT'S NOTES
Today, for the first time, Doriel Waldman stretches out on the couch and stays there. Bravo. How can I thank the gods for small victories? Without waiting for my first question, he returns to his fear of illness.
“Usually capricious, it slowly infiltrates the humdrum of everyday life, or it bursts violently, even more readily than in periods of tragedy. A movement of the head or arm, a suppressed or awkward caress, one word too many is all that's needed to make the world around me, or my inner world, cave in and drag me along. Then images and drawings, memories of tears and laughter, become jumbled and interwoven before disintegrating into a neutral blur, a strange, weightless atmosphere cut off from time. True, there are occasional breakthroughs, even glimmers of light in the fog, but one second later, everything starts up again. And in this depressed state, I no longer know who is who, and who I am.”
As I'm jotting everything down in my notebook without comment, he goes on: “Yes, Doctor, a fleeting guilty kiss, nothing else before or after, was all it took for the order of things to be forever disrupted. Don't ask me if I'm speaking from experience— perhaps I'm speaking of yours.”
He speaks of a kiss. Should I ask him to elaborate? Best not to interrupt him. He's in excellent form; let him continue.
“Therefore, blind in facing the future, dispossessed of all hope, yes
terday's unfortunate lover expects nothing from others now and even less from himself. Yet before he believed in the future fervently, with all his heart and soul; now he no longer does. There again, don't ask me if the poor dreamer is me; I won't tell you. It's like believing in man's humanity: I used to believe in it, heart and soul, in spite of man. I no longer believe in it. For all you know, I could be telling you about the life and slow death of a man I don't know; I only know he's a human being like you and me, but his fate has been manipulated, disfigured, amputated. That's the illness.”
So I can take notes without leaving anything out, I keep listening to him but I don't look at him, not even sideways. I concentrate on particular words and am surprised by his dry tone of voice. No trace of sentimentality or self-pity. And yet, with every sentence, I expect him to allude to a nervous breakdown, a depression, a botched suicide attempt caused by his illness.
He stops to catch his breath, and I take the opportunity to ask a little question, as if inadvertently: “And the kiss?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You mentioned it a moment ago.”
“Up to me to talk; up to you to listen.”
“But—”
“If I'm not mistaken, the last word I uttered wasn't kiss but illness.“
“Fine, let's talk about it. This illness of yours, when did it start?”
“Really, Doctor, you disappoint me! Do you really think one can pinpoint the origin of a desire or the fear of seeing this desire die out? And what if I told you that this illness is older than I am, would you believe me? Better yet: Would you understand me? In fact, by questioning me about my past, you're forcing me to make a big, exhausting effort, you're making me think out loud, and it's painful. Are you aware of this? You're driving me to entertain doubts about myself, to analyze my thought, open it up, dissect it, go back in time, far back, as far back as possible, to the last frontier, to its inception, hence to human thought in its earliest form, which would be that of the Creator. Is that what you want? And what if I told you that my thought, which you're tracking through me, goes not back and forth in a straight line but in fits and starts; it consists of shattered fragments; it burrows a path in a zigzag from one image to another, from one brain to another, from one existence to another, I'd almost be tempted to say from planet to planet, from galaxy to galaxy, from god to God?”
His speech becomes more rapid, almost breathless: “It could be, Doctor, that the difference between us is our attitude toward reason. For you, a scientist who is used to believing in reason and rationality, thinking is a noble undertaking, for it questions you while it questions itself: for isn't man ‘a thinking reed,’ an animal who reflects on his condition, a creature who elevates or lowers himself, imprisons or frees himself thanks to thought? That's not the way I see it, Doctor. For me, for the madman that I'm afraid of becoming or that I might already be, thinking is an unreasonable, complicated, painful undertaking that can go up in smoke and end buried in ashes. For me, thought can quickly unravel, crumble to bits, become dispersed and go offtrack: trying to cohabit with it can spell ruin. It drags me beyond myself. Like a cancerous cell disrupting an organ's function, thought chooses simple words but unpredictable routes and winding pathways, marked with poisoned arrows, to attain its goal in a crazy instability or in the monster's jaws. That's why, Doctor, not being me, you'll never be able to think like me. The words that leave my lips are not those that your ears pick up. Sometimes I search for words that refuse to come out; they remain hidden, inside, with the lump in my throat. Do you hear them? No. That's why, Doctor, through you, I'll say it and repeat it to anyone who wishes or doesn't wish to hear it: I won't allow the clarity of language to be glorified in my presence, or the beauty of its form; I will not allow the praise of refreshing sleep or redemptive thought. Both are nothing but illusions and betrayals; if madness lives within me, it has the right to repudiate them—and to announce that one can become mad out of disgust for clichés, for ready-made sentences that one feels like breaking and punishing. Did I make myself sufficiently clear?”
He stops, exhausted. Should I point out to him that what he's just said, and his way of saying it, could easily be proof that he isn't ill at all? That the ease with which he expresses himself is evidence of a lucid mind, of an intellectual power that enables him to develop, with simple words, a surprisingly limpid and remarkably well-constructed set of ideas? I might irritate him. Isn't denying the patient's illness stealing what makes his personality, hence his identity? I confine myself to humorously praising his intellectual qualities. After all, didn't he cite Pascal, the mystic, in his monologue, and Nietzsche, the philosopher?
“I have the feeling,” I say to him, “that philosophical doubt is what torments you most. Am I wrong?”
“It attracts me and torments me only when the philosopher in me dominates. I resent all the people who prefer solutions to problems. Take Plato and his theory of philosopher kings. I'm for philosopher madmen or mad philosophers: for me, they are the real kings.”
I wonder if he's telling the truth. I'm convinced he remembers an incident, an episode, a wound that marks, for him, the boundary between before and after. There is always a moment of crisis when reason fails. Odd fellow, Doriel. I catch myself thinking that I find him different from my other patients. Curious. In my notes, I cross out the word curious and replace it with strange.
And that “kiss” he dropped as if regretfully …
Occasionally now Martin will quiz me on the morale of this very special patient. Usually he respects my reticence about divulging what happens in my office; he knows perfectly well that medical confidentiality includes spouses: betraying the patient's trust is forbidden. If I keep silent, so does Martin. But recently he can't refrain from trying to make me talk. It seems that, for the first time, one of my “cases” interests him. I stand up to him, invoking the principle of the private hunting ground. I tell him that a doctor's office is not a library where, by definition, everything is available to satisfy the visitor's curiosity. And since he's insistent, I ask him to tell me the reason. His answer: he feels this patient preoccupies and troubles me more than others. I admit it, while refusing to explain why. Martin isn't happy; I realize that. I also realize this is the first time our relationship has become strained.
Excuse me, what I just said is inaccurate. Ever since our marriage, ten years ago, and even before, one subject has always made us uneasy: not having children. Yet he wanted to have children and so did I. “You're afraid for your career?” he used to ask me. “Do you really think that a good mother can't take care of her patients?” He didn't understand a thing about the situation, or at least he pretended not to. And I kept silent. A taboo subject. Not to be broached. Actually, I was lying by omission to my husband. Yes, I was afraid. Afraid of his not liking me. Afraid of remaining alone, of being abandoned for not giving him a child. I had consulted the best specialists. My mother, deeply religious in spite of the hardships of the past, had even begged a renowned Hasidic rebbe to intercede with the Almighty on my behalf. But my gynecologist had left me no hope.
Yet we loved each other. For both of us, it was a first love, or almost—let's say the first serious love. A serene love, not a tempestuous passion, devoid of social or religious obstacles. We were both born in New York, into well-to-do Jewish families. His parents came from Poland, mine from Hungary. I went to college in Boston, he in Chicago. We met by chance in the airport during a blizzard, in the middle of the afternoon. Hundreds of travelers were rushing around looking for taxis to get home. The airline personnel advised us to call the nearest hotels. All the phone lines were busy, and whoever could get through was told, “Sorry, we're fully booked.” In the evening, the waiting rooms turned into huge dormitories. Strangers fraternized, exchanging lamentations and exclamations such as “Oh, if I'd only known!” Relationships lasting one night for the most part. Mine with Martin will last a lifetime, as they say.
We completed our graduate
studies at the same university in Philadelphia: his in the social sciences; mine in medicine, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. Initially I wanted to specialize in the criminally insane. We got along perfectly. He helped me find specialized works, and I helped him understand their content. Our first discussions revolved around my vocation: Why was I fascinated by history's great criminals? Probably because, under the influence of Dostoyevsky, more often than not, I saw them as ill.
Martin: “But what is it that interests you in them now, and in your prospective patients later: the crime or the illness?”
Me: “The connection between the two, that's what fascinates me. Because, for me, there's a connection.”
Neither he nor I allude to what remains locked inside us, notably, the fact that this connection is closely related to our parents, both his and mine: they are survivors from over there. Isn't that the reason why Martin, possibly subconsciously, decided to become an archivist? So he could have access to forgotten documents covering the dark period? In those days I didn't know yet, but I found out later, that Martin's parents suffered from the same badly healed wounds as mine. That's another taboo subject now: we talk about everything, including the Second World War, but not about the tragedy that befell European Jews, called the Holocaust, for lack of a better word. We've never uttered the word under our roof. If perchance someone mentions it on television, Martin scowls, as though he is being personally attacked. He gets up and turns off the television set. After a long, awkward pause, our conversation resumes, calm and fruitful, each of us safeguarding, in our heart of hearts, a very secret, fragile, and vulnerable area belonging to our parents, whom we want to protect without really knowing why or for how long.
Eventually, I gave up my specialization. I'm busy with therapy full-time.
