A Curable Romantic (27 page)

It was hard to know how to reply. The urbane, skeptical man of science had simply disappeared. Before my very eyes, Dr. Freud had transformed himself into just another credulous Jew. I looked down at my hands and brought my fingers together.

“Forgive me, Dr. Freud, for my” — I struggled to find the appropriate
word — “blockheadedness, I suppose you’d call it, but are you suggesting to me that Ita has died, an occurrence of which, until this very moment, I’ve learned nothing, neither from my sisters nor from my mother, whose correspondence I receive periodically, and that she has returned to haunt me, through Fräulein Eckstein, as a dybbuk?”

“No, of course not!” Dr. Freud cried. Relaxing a bit, he even laughed. “To believe such a thing in this age of electrical lights and gramophones …” He ruffled his hair with his hand, knocking his hat askew. “No, as I’ve said, it’s clear that yesteryear’s demonical possession corresponds entirely to the hysteria of our time. However” — and here he grew rigid and troubled again — “one cannot dismiss out of hand one’s patients’ delusions without threatening the therapeutic bond, you see. And so I’m afraid we’ve no choice but to accept — provisionally, provisionally, of course — whatever the patient brings to us until we can demonstrate to her the falseness of her own claims.”

Dr. Freud reminded me of a story he’d told me once before: encountering Bertha Pappenheim (the not-yet-famous Anna O.) in the throes of an hysterical pregnancy, calling out ‘Here comes Dr. B’s baby, here comes Dr. B’s baby,’ Dr. Breuer had run from her bedside all the way to Italy, fleeing the scene and, in his bourgeois cowardice, leaving his patient in less competent hands.

“The instant Breuer told me this story,” Dr. Freud said, gritting his teeth, “I resolved never to allow myself to be similarly unmanned by a lack of analytic nerve.”

WE RODE FOR
a moment in silence, the tattoo of the horses’ hooves muffled by the snow.

“It’s odd,” I said.

“Yes?”

“But as a child, I was present at a dybbuk possession.”

With his handkerchief pressed against his nostril, Dr. Freud eyed me with a somewhat astonished, somewhat indulgent look of irritation. “My God, Sammelsohn, you’re like Burton returned from Medina with a thousand and one tales of the mysterious East!”

“Well, it’s not the sort of thing one talks about freely,” I confessed.
In fact, these were tales I’d never told anyone, but especially not Dr. Freud, who, regarding them with his jaundiced medical eye, I feared would see in them evidence for all sorts of psychopathologies on my part. Also, although I knew them to be true, somehow in the bright splendor of Vienna, they seemed, though exotic or odd or piquant, utterly and ultimately false. And yet my friend Shaya and I
had
hidden beneath Khave Kaznelson’s bed the day Vladek the Wagon Driver entered her as a dybbuk.

He was a terrible man, this Vladek, a drunkard who, it was said, murdered his customers if he suspected they were carrying diamonds or gold. Leaving the bodies by the roadside, he’d claimed that bandits had done the killings and sometimes wounded himself in the foot or the arm in order to make his story appear more convincing to the police.

Of course, at first no one knew that it was Vladek who had entered Khave’s body. Summoned to her bedside by her frantic husband, the rebbe asked the spirit to identify itself.

“Who are you, spirit?” he demanded, speaking as forcefully as I’d ever heard him, and he was one of those screamers whose shrill exhortations could make the wood mites fall out of the ceiling beams of the shul.

“Why should I talk to you, you filthy Jew?” the voice roared back in a coarse, masculine way. “Send for a priest! I’m a good Christian and demand a proper exorcism!”

The rebbe would hear none of it. “Since, wicked creature, you have taken it into your head to inhabit a goodwife of Israel, a lamb for whom I am the shepherd, you shall deal with me instead.”

“A goodwife?” the voice scoffed. “Now there’s a laugh!”

“Silence!” the rebbe demanded.

“Why, when I could tell you a story or two?”

As though with one breath, a gasp erupted from the crowd ringing Khave Kaznelson’s bed.

“I want the children out of here! out!” the rebbe screamed.

We thought we were safe enough, Shaya and I, unseen beneath the bed, huddled on our stomachs, our fists balled against our ribs, but over Shaya’s shoulders, I saw two large hands appear, then the tip of a beard, then an angry eye. As the hands manacled themselves around
Shaya’s ankles, I felt the same thing happening to mine. The next thing I knew, we were sliding away from each other. “Yankl!” he cried, throwing out his hands like rescue ropes before him. I did the same, our fingers locking, but we were dragged apart, lifted out on either side of Khave Kaznelson’s bed, and held there, each of us in the arms of a strong man, like Torah scrolls on either side of the bimah during the blessings for the month of Teves. Of course, we struggled to break free, but we were helpless to do so.

However, when Vladek spoke next — “Why bother me? What trouble am I causing you?” — everyone seemed to forget about us. Held above her bed, I saw with my own eyes that Vladek’s voice emanated not from Khave Kaznelson’s mouth, but from her throat, where there was an unnaturally large bulge.

“The children,” the rebbe commanded, “remove them, I say!”

We were trundled out, passed from hand to hand, like buckets in a fire brigade.

“I, Vladek the Wagon Driver, am a murderer! Cursed be the law of God which seeks my destruction!” was the last thing I heard before the bedroom door was slammed. We raced outside the house, but the children watching through the windows were already four lines deep, though the curtains had been drawn, and no one could see anything at all.

AS I FEARED,
Shaya and I were summoned to the rebbe’s study that evening. Naturally enough, we believed we were in trouble, and naturally enough, we’d each constructed an alibi that exonerated himself while incriminating his friend. Sitting outside the rebbe’s door on a cold, hard bench, I’d noticed that the nails of my hands were black beneath their tips. I scraped the dirt out with the corner of a tooth and had my hand in my mouth when Reb Yudel opened the study door. “Have you no shmatte?” he asked with a scowl. “Well then, wipe the spittle on your pants.” I rubbed my hand against my knee, while Reb Yudel muttered, “Stupid boy.”

It seemed to take years to cross the room with Reb Yudel pinching at our necks. Our legs moved numbly; we didn’t seem to be advancing at all. The rebbe sat in the corner of the room behind his desk, reading
by candlelight, half his face illuminated by the flame, the other half in shadow. He seemed not to be getting any larger as we approached him, until suddenly, there he was, an enormous figure looming above us.

“Sit,” Reb Yudel commanded us, and we sat. Or more precisely: he dropped us into our chairs. After what seemed like a thousand years, the rebbe looked up from his book, the one eye lit by the candlelight peering at Shaya and me, before gravitating slowly upwards towards Reb Yudel. “Thank you, Yudel,” the rebbe said. “You may leave us now.”

I could hear Reb Yudel’s footsteps receding behind me, though I dared not look. His departure seemed to take forever, during which time the rebbe kept his gaze in alignment (or so I calculated) with Reb Yudel’s back. His soft, papery hands, though one clutched the other, hardly seemed to be touching. Finally, the click-clacking of the door’s opening and shutting sounded and after an eternity of silence, the rebbe lowered his gaze and took us in.

“Quite a show this afternoon, gentlemen, quite a show,” he said. “Now, I’m certain neither of you have ever seen such a strange thing in the whole of your lives. Am I correct? However, rest assured, the poor miscreant has confessed his crimes to me, and I have sent a quorum of honest men out to put markers at the graves of his victims and to unbury the loot he has hidden in the woods. And yet” — the rebbe sighed — “that’s the least of my concerns tonight.”

The rising moon filled the little window in the wall behind him, its light illuminating his shoulders with a glowing mantle. His eyebrows, thick and wiry, were as tangled as two blackberry bushes. As I studied his face, they looked suddenly out of place, as though a prankster had cut off someone’s mustache and glued it, in two pieces, over the rebbe’s eyes.

“Are you familiar with the term
dybbuk
?” he said, clasping his hands together and learning forward on his elbows. “I thought not. However, I’m certain you know that the human soul is a spark of the Holy One’s light. Of course, you know this — you’re children and still see things clearly — and so you also know that just as one flame can be made from another flame without diminishing the first, the soul of man, like a wick properly trimmed, may burn with the radiance of divine light. Now, our sacred Torah tells us that God is an all-consuming fire, and yet it also
tells us that those who cling to God are alive today — not consumed by the fire! How can that be?” he demanded. “Which is it? Which is the truth?” he shouted, slamming his hand against the desk. “Is the Lord an all-consuming fire or a being to whom we may cling and not burn up?”

I was afraid he expected one of us to answer the question, but before we could speak he continued on in a calmer voice. “Now, the teachings of the Eternal are perfect. You know this. God isn’t a man that He writes and blots out. God forbid! There are no contradictions in His holy teachings. And so which is it then? Is the Lord an all-consuming fire or may we cling to him and not perish in the flames? Ah, but I see that you’re ahead of me here, my dears. Yes, you are, you’re quick, and that is correct: fire is not consumed by fire. The fiery soul of man cannot be extinguished in the burning embrace of Heaven. And yet, and yet, my good boys, there are souls, souls of the dead, who naturally fear this divine conflagration. We see this in life all the time, do we not? How a man runs and returns, runs and returns …”

He sat for a moment with his arms crossed, looking from one corner of the room to the other, as though at a man running and returning, and finally, he spoke again. “The Judge of the Universe is, thank Heaven, a fair judge. He cannot be bribed. Indeed not. The Heavenly Court runs according to the same strict system of justice as, l’havdil, our Emperor’s Court. How could it be otherwise? There is an Eye that sees, and an Ear that hears, and each of us must give an accounting of his own life. Each of us — why, both of you, for that matter — will stand trial in the Heavenly Court. Yes, that’s true. One day, you will be required to defend every one of your deeds, may they all be for good, my darlings, may they all be for the good!”

He sighed, and his face grew sad.

“However, just as there are men in this world who owe and do not hurry to repay or who, having committed crimes, connive to put off their punishment, so there are souls — the souls of the blackest of sinners — who prefer to put off such a reckoning in the next world for as long as they’re able. Refusing to submit to divine justice, these souls wander the great broadways and desolate plains of the other world, a world that touches our own — can you feel it, children? can you? I know you
can — at various points and most rapturously, I’m told, though I’ve never experienced it myself, in our holy city of Jerusalem, may we live to see the day of its redemption, when the Holy Messiah will make known His holy name, may it be soon in our times, amen!”

His face grew tender. “There are doorways, my dears, doorways to the next world and doorways back, and there is no doorway more open than the human heart. Only with his heart may a Jew serve the Holy One. But out of fear, the eye of the heart darkens, and we mistake the blessings the Holy One renders us for punishments. There is no punishment, my dears, but sometimes the Holy One blesses us with a very harsh Hand. And so it is with these errant souls, upon whom the Holy One causes to descend a horde of unruly angels. But is there no place where a soul like this may shelter from the pangs of her tormentors? I can see the question in your eyes. You’re sweet children, you’re dear, sweet children, and you’re wondering: How could God allow these demons to torment a poor and naked soul, tearing into it, as though into its flesh, with their whips and their cudgels and their chains? And also what kind of repentance may a soul sincerely make under such extremities? And you’re right. No, of course, you’re right, it isn’t just!” He shook his head. “It isn’t just. And so, in His mercy, which is infinite, the Holy One extends shelter even to those souls who refuse to submit to His judgment, permitting her to hide in a rock or an animal or, may God protect us from such plagues, in the body of a human being. Is the Merciful One not merciful? He provides shelter even for the soul who flaunts His justice, spitting into His face, as it were, God forbid. However, just as, at dawn, all eyes turn to the east, so all souls, no matter how degraded they’ve become, seek a reunion with the Beloved of all Beloveds, perhaps without even knowing it, for by hiding in a human being, the dybbuk gives herself away, doesn’t she, and why would she want to do that?”

The rebbe stared over our little trembling shoulders, as though, without making a sound, someone had entered the room. He smiled gently, as one might at a friend one hasn’t seen in years. “You know,” he whispered over his interlaced fingers, raising his woolly eyebrows, “this is not the first dybbuk to whose aid I have been called.” He leaned in closer to us.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He glanced about the room like a sneakthief. “But will you promise never to reveal a word I say to you to another living being? Not even to your own mothers or fathers?”

Shaya and I nodded mutely.

“And not even to talk of it among yourselves after you leave this room?”

We silently agreed.

He snarled. “You know what happens to little boys who break their promises, don’t you?”

We shook our heads.

“No, and you don’t want to know either!” Finally, he sat back in his chair. “So it’s agreed, then? The following will remain strictly between the three of us here tonight? Good. Now as I was saying: Khave Kaznelson’s was not the first dybbuk to whose aid I had been summoned. Nothing remarkable about that. But would it shock you, my dears, if I told you that the last time had been more than three hundred years ago?” He raised his furry eyebrows. “And what if I added that it was neither as myself as you see me now, nor in this town, nor in this life that I performed this good deed?” He crossed his arms. “And yet it was so.”