A Curable Romantic (38 page)

“Ita?” I said, kissing her now behind her ear, untying her collar, cupping my hand around her warm breast. “I’m here — just as you’ve asked me to be.”

Reader, how happy I would be to skip over this next part, but as I have committed myself to the whole bolt of truth, no inferior remnant will do. Still, it’s impossible to convey the horror of what next occurred. As I cupped my hand around Fräulein Eckstein’s breast, a masculine voice rang out, filling the room, like a sonorous gong, with its castigations: “Dr. Sammelsohn,” it cried, “what on earth are you doing? Are you out of your mind!”

I removed my hand from the patient’s chest and peered over my shoulder towards the door where I imagined I might face my accuser. No one, however, was there. Assuming the voice belonged merely to my conscience, I sighed with relief until it addressed me a second time: “We’re not behind you.”

“No?” I said into thin air.

“Rather you hold us in your arms.”

I looked at Fräulein Eckstein. She stared at me with an unnerving intensity. Her mouth was agape and the deep ringing voice emanated — I was horrified to realize this — from somewhere within her! I dropped her instantly — “I’m terribly sorry, my good sir!” — and jumped away from the
bed, unrolling my cuffs and wrapping myself in my jacket. “Of course, I didn’t realize …” I began, but I could think of nothing further to say.

“He’s stunned! Ha! Yes, stunned into silence! We tend to have that effect on people.”

It was true: I was stunned into silence, and I was speechless to deny it. I was as mute as a man who has bitten off his own tongue and, gasping in alarm, accidentally swallows it.

“May I ask the name of the one who is addressing me?” I finally managed to say.

With an athletic grace I’d never seen in her before, Fräulein Eckstein stretched out on the bed and kicked off its covers. She lay on her side, propped up by her elbows, and cocked her head against her fist. An ironic look played across her face.

“It never changes, does it? ‘Tell me your name.’ That’s always the first thing they ask.”

The rude shocks kept coming! Before I could respond to this odd statement, a second voice, also from inside Fräulein Eckstein, responded to the first: “Only too true, too true,” it said.

This voice was masculine as well, with a lilt similar to the first’s. My ear couldn’t quite place the accent. Its geographies were unknown to me. What distinguished it from the other voice was a certain raspiness; and each time it sounded, the Fräulein’s physique took on a more hulking aspect. “That’s
him
?” the raspy voice cried. Making use of the Fräulein’s body, its possessor seemed to glare out of it at me suspiciously.

“Ya’akov Yosef ben Alter Nosn?” the other inquired politely, inclining Fräulein Eckstein’s chin in my direction. “That
is
you, isn’t it?”

The two seemed to be sharing Fräulein Eckstein’s body, taking turns with it, as it were, like two men peering through a tiny window, each stepping back to let the other have a look before stepping up again.

“We’ve heard so much about you,” the gentler voice said, before whispering to his friend, “Not as prepossessing as she made out.”

“She’s in love,” the huskier fellow replied, also in a whisper. “You know how she tends to exaggerate things.”

Fräulein Eckstein sat upon her mattress in an attitude that was shockingly
gruff, one foot flat upon the floor, the other tucked beneath her thigh, her legs uncrossed and parted. Periodically, she scratched herself — under her arm, along the inseam of her crotch, at her throat as though whiskers were irritating her skin. When the two beings inside her conversed, not with me, but with each other, her head moved first to the right, then to the left. The effect was not unlike watching a madman having a conversation with himself. The two, it seemed, were brothers, for despite the well-known folkloric prohibition against an immortal surrendering his name, they were only too happy to introduce themselves to me.

“What are you going to do with it, anyway?” the gentler one asked. “Besides, who can pronounce it correctly?”

He identified himself as
.

(This, in any case, is my rough typographical approximation of the word he spoke. In truth, when I asked for the spelling, he grew uncharacteristically truculent and employed all manner of diversion to dissuade any further inquiry along these lines. “What are you planning to do? Put it in a book?” he snarled. In pronunciation, the name sounded something like a blowing wind, and I soon realized it belonged to the angelic being who had met Ita after she’d parted so violently from her life.)

“As we always do,” he said, sighing. “The poor thing is as addicted to unhappy lives as an addict to his morphine.”

“And your brother?” I asked him. “What role does he play?”

Before the brother could answer,
brought Fräulein Eckstein’s hands together, in a gesture of supplication. “Dr. Sammelsohn? Pardon us, but the space here is hardly sufficient for one of us, never mind two.”

“Would it terrify you horribly if we left this sausage casement and revealed ourselves to you in a less narrow guise?”

“It’s difficult to judge such things in advance,” I said.

“A sensible man.”
nodded.

“Just how terrifying are you?” I asked.

“Oh, horribly,” the brother said with a laugh. “Not at all,”
promised in the same breath. “Don’t listen to him. Stop it now,
He’s only joking.”

(It was then that I caught the brother’s name. It sounded like water draining from a tub.) What could I do? I’d witnessed so many frightening
things in the last few days. I couldn’t imagine surrendering to my terror now. Instead I said, “Certainly. Do as you wish. Whatever makes you comfortable.”

“Then on that wire that stretches from wall to wall, and upon which nurses hang a curtain to allow their patients to dress and undress in modesty, hang a curtain yourself, a sheer bedsheet, and we will appear behind it in order to address you.”

I did as they asked, finding exactly what they’d requested in a trunk at the foot of Fräulein Eckstein’s bed. How much time passed in this way, I cannot say. Time seemed of no importance here, until I thought of poor Dr. Freud, waiting outside the door, imagining God only knows what perverse raptures Fräulein Eckstein and Ita and I were committing in our odd ménage a trois.

“You might as well invite him in, your friend,”
said.

“Ah, yes, that’s right,”
added. “He’s sleeping outside the door, isn’t he?”

“You’ll do well to have someone with whom to share the experience.”

“Creatures such as yourself — ”

“By which he means human beings.”

“ — tend to forget.”

“They forget what they’ve forgotten.”

“And then that is forgotten as well.”

WERE I FLUENT
in all the tongues of mankind, still I doubt I could accurately describe what happened next. Two pops sounded, each with an electric flash. Fräulein Eckstein twice jerked up and then lay still, stiller than I’d seen her since I’d entered the room. A great wind whooshed by me; the gaslights flickered before failing. The bedsheet I’d hung across the wire billowed out with a boisterous flapping before falling perfectly silent and still. Behind it, as though projected upon it from the rear, was a small, round point of light that grew steadily in size and brightness — I was reminded of the headlamp of an approaching locomotive — until it illuminated the entire sheet. Outlined in an even brighter light were the figures of two broad-shouldered men, one lithe and graceful, the other hulking with a dog-like snout.