A Curable Romantic (26 page)

“Father, no!” I pleaded with him, but he refused to hear me out. “I’m only a child,” I protested. “I don’t need to be married!”

he said.
Don’t tell me you’re just a child, because wherever I’ll send you, there you shall go!
(Jeremiah 1:7).

“No! I won’t go through with it!” I shouted in his face.

My sisters restrained me as though I were a wild animal, while Father finished the verse:
And everything I order you to say, you’ll say!

Something broke inside me. Held down on all sides by my sisters’ fourteen arms, I looked up into Father’s face and saw nothing in it but unrelieved hatred. As the red-hot point of his anger scorched me, my world darkened. I couldn’t believe he was willing to debase himself so thoroughly out of spite, but hatred for me had overwhelmed his sense of proportion.

All of Szibotya was invited to witness my humiliation. Every seat in our synagogue was full. Even in the women’s section upstairs, amused faces glowered down at us, their eyes lit with the same glee they might contain at the prospect of a particularly naughty Purim spiel. Zealot enough to ruin his own reputation, to make a laughingstock of himself for the sake of his piety, Father was certain, I’m sure, that by conspiring in his own degradation for the sake of the holy Torah, his exaltation would manifest like a translucent halo above his head before the eyes of all the wedding guests.

Astonished to find myself once again beneath the wedding canopy, I felt like the Paschal Lamb: chosen, it’s true, but as a sacrifice. Whose fault was it that I had strayed, that I had corrupted myself with forbidden
books, if not Father’s and the community he represented, all of whom had driven me to those books by the hollowness of their pietistic poses?

I looked at Ita, at her flat face and her little hump, at the strings of saliva that flew from her mouth whenever she became too excited. She’d already crushed and destroyed most of the lilies in the bouquet they’d given her, twisting their stems in her uncomprehending agitation. Though any romantic hopes for herself were futile, what right had they to make a mockery of them? How could they so willfully blind themselves to the fact that beneath her concave, narrow chest, unconnected to her malfunctioning brain, beat the still quite feminine heart of a young girl, who, despite everything (this much was clear to see), wanted only to be loved?

I could barely look her in the eye, neither in the good one, nor in the one with the drooping lid. I endured the ceremony, in order not to embarrass her, but I’d hatched a plan.

“Ita, my dear,” I spoke as gently as I could when, after the ceremony, we were left alone in a private room, as is our religious custom.

“Muh dee-uhr,” she repeated numbly. As you will recall, such repetitions formed the whole of her vocabulary.

She in her virginal white, I in my Hasidic wedding garb, we sat on either side of an elegant table set intimately for two and piled high — the vindictive irony of my father knew no bounds! — with the finest of foods: whole broiled chickens sprinkled with rosemary, roasted potatoes, savory onions, spicy kasha, exotic grapes, prunes, raisins, nuts. I stuffed everything I could into the small bag I had concealed beneath my talis katan.

“Ita must listen now,” I instructed her.

“Eee-taw mush l-l-l-lee-sun,” she said, nodding, her eye with the drooping lid glazed and unfocused, the other one sharp and clear. With an upward motion, she rubbed her wrist against the bottom of her nose and smeared away the snot.

“Yankl must go.”

“Unkull gaw?” she said, picking at a scab on her dirty knee.

“Yes. Far, far away. To Vienna.”

“Unkull gaw fuh wai?”

I had my doubts about how much the poor girl understood. Surely she possessed no accurate sense of time or distance, nor enough mind to imagine that a life with me was what this wedding was supposed to mean. Surely an hour after I climbed out the window (for such was my plan), she would forget about the events of this late afternoon, this odd wedding, no different, really, from the thousand and one cruelties to which she’d been subjected during her short life. Marrying Ita in a mock ceremony and having to kiss the bride was a game that not only the cruelest children but all of us had played. Still I was struck by the tears that appeared in her downturned eyes.

“Ita, listen,” I whispered.

She nodded, and her mouth was open. She breathed through it, and I could see her tongue twitching like a restless sleeper in its bed.

“They will ask Ita where Yankl go.”

“Wuh Unkull gaw?” She seemed in all sincerity to have asked this question, although I knew that was impossible. Agitated, she further twisted the lilies she was still holding in her small, stubby hands.

“Ita must tell them …”

“Eee-taw taw-al,” she confirmed in her plodding, monstrous voice.

“Say to them: Yankl goes to liberate the masses from religious and political oppression.”

She repeated the sentence in her sluggish, slurred way, faltering over the final difficult word.

“Oppression,” I repeated.

“Uh-preh-shzun!”

“Again!”

“Ug-gun.”

“No, Ita. Say ‘oppression’ again.”

She tried the sentence again.

“Good, Ita!”

“Goo Eee-taw!” She pointed to the cleft of her chest.

“Tell them: Shame on you, you pious frauds.”

She gargled the phrases fiercely.

“Tell them that Ita looks forward to the day when you bourgeois parasites will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

She repeated my words as well as she could, and she surprised me by spitting on the ground.

“Good enough,” I said.

“Nah, naht eee-nuf,” she said.

“No, it is, it is, it’s good enough, Ita.”

“Eee-nuf,” she seemed to plead suddenly, reaching out to me, but of course she had no idea what she was saying. “Yunkull!” she shrieked.

I had by this time pulled back the heavy drapery and had opened the window and was already halfway out of it, sitting with one leg dangling over the outer wall and one leg on the sill.

“Ita, what is it?”

She spoke with more difficulty than usual. “Eee-taw … iz … bride tew you.”

“No.”

“Iz bri-i-id!” she insisted.

“It was a joke, Ita, a silly joke. A trick, that’s all.”

“D’rik?”

“A play. Like a Purim play.”

“Boo-reem?”

“And now that play is over, you see, or almost. One scene more to go. Where has Yankl gone? … Ita?”

“Unkull gaw li-ber-ate maz-sez frahm ree-lee-jee-uss a-an-duh poleee-tee-kul …” she faltered.

“Oppression.”

“Upp …”

“It’s not important. They won’t listen to you anyway.”

“Up-reh-shzun!” she said.

“Good. And who’s to blame?”

“Sh-sh-shay-mmm awn ye-e-u pi-jus … frowds!” she cried with a sense of conviction that was truly alarming.

“Good for you, Ita,” I said. “Excellent, excellent. That’s fine. But now I’ve got to go.”

“Taw lee-ber-ate maz-ses, Yunkull?”

“Yes, to liberate the Jewish masses, Ita. One poor Jew at a time. Starting with myself.”

“Guh-buh, ma-iiii huh-huhzs-bund,” she said softly.

“No, Ita, not husband, not really. It was only a play.”

“Bor-eem p’lai.”

“Yes, that’s right, a Purim play.”

She cut a forlorn figure, with her hump and her paralyzed arm and her drooping eyelid and the shapeless white dress they had made for her out of God knows what cheap muslin.

“Good-bye, my love,” I whispered to her as sweetly as I could.

“Guh-buh, mufh luh-fff?”

I was about to drop from the window to the ground when she called my name, her face straining, as if she were actually thinking and the effort were costing her.

“Ita?”

“Huhzs-bund?”

“No.”

“Huhzs-bund!” she insisted.

“No, no husband, Ita. A play.”

“Yunkull
eez
huhzs-bund!”

“No, Ita not wife. Yankl not husband.”

“Raabai sez!”

“It was only a play.”

“AND?” DR. FREUD
said.

I looked through the window of the fiacre. We were far beyond the Ring now, in a district I didn’t know. “I jumped from the window,” I told him. “I couldn’t even see where I landed; my eyes were filled with tears. An hour before, I’d hidden a tailor’s shears in the bushes behind the synagogue, along with a darning needle and a thread, and a mirror. I ran until dark, and I kept running, following the roads, navigating by moonlight and starlight until sleep overtook me. I awoke at dawn the next morning and ate an entire chicken. My wedding feast! Then I set about my work. Two snips and my earlocks were gone. A little tailoring, a little darning, a little thread, and my telltale caftan was an inconspicuous short coat. I regarded myself in the mirror. I was, I thought,
utterly transformed. I was picked up later in the day by a merchant on whose spice cart I rode all the way into Vienna. I looked up my uncle Moritz, the family heretic and Father’s bête noire, against whom I’d been warned my entire life, and of course, he took me in and treated me quite warmly, even seeing to my education. Though he begged me to do so, I never bothered divorcing Ita, knowing that it played no practical purpose. They were never going to marry her again. Even those cruel people couldn’t have been
that
cruel.”

Dr. Freud was quiet, and I was quiet as well.

“Dr. Sammelsohn — may I ask?” he said, licking the inside of his lips. “Did you ever speak to Fräulein Eckstein about any of this?”

“Most assuredly not.”

“Nor about Hindele, your previous wife?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Nothing about life in Szibotya?”

“I assure you, Dr. Freud, on the occasions Fräulein Eckstein and I met, I could barely get an edge in wordwise.”

“Troubling,” Dr. Freud said. “Troubling, indeed. And yet, as scientists, there is naught for us to do but analyze each datum as it presents itself. Let me apprise you on how things currently stand.”

ACCORDING TO DR.
Freud, after the episode in my apartment, he’d renewed his efforts with Fräulein Eckstein and all seemed well for a time, until inexplicably the patient began hemorrhaging again from her nose. Her nasal passages swelled, and a fetid odor set in.

“I tried irrigating her,” he said, “but there seemed to be an obstacle inside. I called in Dr. Gersuny, who inserted a drainage tube into her nose, hoping things would work themselves out once a discharge was reestablished.” Dr. Freud shook his head. “Two days later, she was bleeding again, profusely this time. As Gersuny wasn’t available till evening, I called in Dr. Rosanes, who started cleaning the area, removing blood clots, and the next moment, for no discernible reason, out shot a flood of blood.”

“Oh my!” I said.

“Yes,” Dr. Freud said. “The Fräulein turned white, her eyes bulged, she
lost her pulse. Rosanes quickly packed her to stop the hemorrhaging, but the poor creature was quite unrecognizable, lying flat on her back. That’s when something quite strange happened.”

“And what was that?”

“A foreign body came out.”

“A foreign body?”

“Ita,” he confirmed, looking at me with a seemingly infinite need for compassion. He raised his chest and sighed. “I felt sick,” he confessed. “After the Fräulein had been packed, I fled to the next room and drank a bottle of water. The brave Frau Doktor, Fräulein Eckstein’s sister-in-law, was kind enough to bring me a small glass of Cognac, and I became myself again. What could I do? Nothing. And so I arranged for the poor unfortunate to be brought to the Sanatorium Loew, where we are going now, and when I returned to the room, shaken, she greeted me with the condescending remark, ‘So
this
is the strong sex!’ Only …” He hesitated.

“Yes?” I encouraged him.

“It wasn’t Fräulein Eckstein speaking.”

“No?”

“But Frau Sammelsohn.”

“Ita, you’re saying?”

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Freud said warily.

“And,” I stammered, “what exactly made you think it was Ita who was addressing you?”

The tone of my voice had sharpened to a lethal point, and Dr. Freud was forced to reconsider his approach.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, I apologize for throwing all this at you as though it were a bucket of water and you had caught on fire. How did I know it was Ita? An excellent question. Well, the voice was different, for one thing, and she introduced herself to me as such.”