A Curable Romantic (46 page)

CHAPTER 21

I woke up, days later, in Dr. Freud’s consultancy. I looked at the ceiling. A thin veil of cobwebs hung from a beam. Dr. Freud’s hand pressed against my forehead, knocking clumsily into my nose. “Sorry,” he said, readjusting his position. His hand was dry and scratchy. His face was near mine — he sat in a chair next to the sofa — and his breath was a mixture of tobacco, peppermint, and inadequate dental care. I closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.

When I awoke next, I was in my own bed. I had no idea how much time had passed, nor how I’d gotten there, but I opened my eyes to find Dr. Freud’s bearded face looming over me again. I felt my head; it was bandaged. Weighed down by the covers, I struggled to sit up.

“Ah, thank Heavens, you’re awake,” he called. “Although I wouldn’t move too fast, if I were you.”

“But what has happened?”

“It’s unclear. The police say they found you, drunken and bareheaded in the snow.”

“And Fräulein Eckstein? How is she?” I said, but before he could answer, I was again fast asleep.

I was able eventually to awaken and to stay awake, and, when I did, I found Dr. Freud sitting in a rocking chair near my bed, sipping at a cup of tea. My landlady brought in soup for me, and when I’d sufficiently regained my strength, Dr. Freud and I had a frank talk. He’d been none too pleased, he told me, stopping by Fräulein Eckstein’s room the day after I’d last seen him, to discover that Ita was gone. “You really gave no thought at all to my scientific researches, did you, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

“It’s hardly my fault,” I said. “All I did was to declare my love for Ita and suggest that she depart Fräulein Eckstein through the nose. Everything that came in between those two events transpired without me.”

“The cause denying responsibility for the effects!” Dr. Freud said sharply. “Well, no matter.” He put down his tea. “Fortunately I’ve
managed to gather enough data to rock the very foundations of the scientific world!”

Before he could do that, however, he’d seen to Fräulein Eckstein’s nose. “It was in a state of ruin,” he whispered. This was partially my fault and partially Ita’s. Mine, because my instructions to her had been imprecise — I should have commanded her to leave, not
through the nose
, but
through the right or left nostril
— and Ita’s, because in her recklessness to scale the barricades of Heaven, she’d taken less care than she might have otherwise done.

As a consequence, the Fräulein’s nose had caved in. Tapping his own nose, Dr. Freud said, “The left middle turbinate bone seemed to have shattered completely.”

He’d called in Dr. Fliess from Berlin, of course — whether because he thought Dr. Fliess the most competent man available or because working with a doctor from out of town might safeguard his own reputation, I cannot say. Neither can I say whether it was earlier or during these procedures that Dr. Fliess left the meter of surgical gauze inside Fräulein Eckstein’s nasal cavity. My sense of time is woozy, and though I retain no high opinion of Dr. Fliess’s medical finesse, I wouldn’t put it past Dr. Freud to have made up the entire tale, just as many now suspect he made up the story of Bertha Pappenheim’s hysterical pregnancy, just as there are those who believe that Dr. Jung made up the story of Dr. Freud’s love affair with his own sister-in-law. These giants of scientific integrity apparently feel no comparable scruple regarding the truth when it comes to the character of their enemies and former friends.

Still, true to his word, Dr. Freud wrote up his notes and presented the case as a paper, on April 21, 1896, before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna. He knew the lecture, entitled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” would be revolutionary, presenting, as it did, not only Ita’s case history but Dr. Freud’s radical new theory that the origins of hysteria lay not in early sexual traumas, as he’d until then maintained, but in “dybbuk seductions,” as he termed them, and other forms of spirit possession. As a therapy, Dr. Freud recommended extensive past-life regression by means of a psychoanalysis and, if need be, hypnosis.

Needless to say, the lecture met with an icy reception, eliciting from Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing the now-famous retort: “It sounds like a
scientific fairy tale!” Dr. Freud’s colleagues rose up as a group, not to denounce him, as one might expect, but to protect him from himself, and the talk was universally suppressed.

Eventually, under pressure from the group, Dr. Freud recanted everything.

Now, according to Dr. Freud, God was nothing more than a symptom of our child-like longing for a father who might exorcise the terrors of nature, reconcile us to our deaths, and compensate us for our suffering and privation.

When we spoke of the matter later, he went so far as to claim that I’d hallucinated the entire affair, including our conversations in my bedroom, while I lay, drunken and bareheaded, in the snow — a claim impossible for me to refute. In his memoirs, he distanced himself even further from Fräulein Eckstein’s case: “If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him,” he wrote, “though I may plead that this was at the time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance in order to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties coming to my notice every day. However, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place and were only phantasies which my patient had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon her.”

As fairy tales go, Dr. Freud’s was neither the sweetest nor the most imaginative, but it served the traditional purpose of fairy tales: lulling its listener into an uncritical sleep.

I saw little of him after that. Our paths never seemed to cross. I can only assume that the sight of me, loveless and forlorn, waiting for my soulmate to be reborn, reminded him too much of his own intellectual duplicities, or perhaps he merely thought me the most gullible of fools. Whatever the reason, my invitations to him were politely, if firmly declined; his and Marty’s ceased coming to me altogether. Thus began the systematic suppression of everything that occurred between Dr. Freud and myself. (Even in Dr. Freud’s famous “Irma” dream, the dream that unlocked the secrets of dream interpretation for him, I appear, concealed, though in plain sight, as a
Sammelperson
, a composite.)

BOOK TWO
MILOJN DA JESOJ;
or, My New Life in the Esperanto Movement

CHAPTER 1

I tried to get on with my life. What else was there for me to do? I threw myself into my work; and when I wasn’t working, I read voluminously; and when I wasn’t reading, I dragged my body out on long walks, dressed head to toe in widower’s black. I wound up most evenings at the Prater, and though I continued to patronize Herr Franz’s Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater, I avoided the prostitutes who hung their wares in the park nearby, fearing that in my misery I lacked the fortitude to resist their squalid charms.

Inside Herr Franz’s, I found myself ogling every newborn daughter in her pram, hoping to catch in her unfocused eye a glint that might say to me:
Yes, Yankl, it is I, your beloved Ita, newly reborn! We’ve only to wait another eighteen years, and we can be married again!

(The only thing I understood with certainty during this difficult time was that no mother enjoys having her infant daughter stared at in this too-inquisitive way by a stranger in a puppet theater with no children of his own to justify his presence there, and who, really, can blame her?)

O,
IF ONLY
I could have ended this book with the scene of Ita dashing headlong onto the ramparts of Heaven from the rumpled sheets of Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital bed! What a glorious drama that would have made! Life, however, does not end where our storybooks do. Or at least mine didn’t. No, the obdurate and all-too-actual world with its crush of petty demands and its dulling routines soon swept me off the high cliffs of my romantic folly, and I was drowned in the wild, raging river of ordinary, everyday life. Though I’d renounced all women in the wake of Ita’s miraculous ascension, and though I intended to keep the pledge I’d made to her — that I would wait for her — the heart is crooked (ah, but who doesn’t know this?) and it wasn’t long before I met another woman.

Just as Dr. Freud played the cicerone in my love affair with Fräulein Eckstein, so Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, in Vienna at the time for an ocular refresher course, played it here. I had no idea who he was, nor any reason to have known him. The era of his greatest fame still lay far in the future. And although he was the second great man I had the privilege of knowing, he couldn’t have been less like Sigmund Freud had he resolved to be unlike him in every way. They had but one characteristic in common: the utter havoc each man brought to my life, and though I imagined my friendship with each would lead me out of the labyrinth of Ita’s attraction for me, both men only dropped me, panting and breathless, at her gate.

WITH LITTLE TO
do in the aftermath of my second expulsion from Dr. Freud’s life, I rededicated myself, as I’ve said, to my work, and as a consequence of the advances I made at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, I’d been asked by my superior, Dr. Koller, to present an ocular refresher course at the university on his behalf. The seminar had been an ordeal from top to bottom. I’d never stood at the head of a class before, and certainly not one filled with doctors, and my nervousness conspired with my sense of inadequacy to such a degree that I had to force myself each day into the lecture hall, where I hacked my way through the curriculum, my wits as dull as a rusted machete, and by the end of the week, I wanted nothing more than to sit in my darkened rooms and breathe in the musty vapors of my more private unhappinesses.

Must I rehearse the litany of my woes? Ita was gone; Dr. Freud had rebanished me to a social Siberia; I was living without apparent remedy for the unnatural widowerhood I’d acquired through the most unworldly of means; and though I’d been married twice, I’d yet to taste the nectar of carnal love. Worse: I’d been driven, by my father, from our family, and though my uncle Moritz had sponsored my medical studies in Vienna, I seemed to have remembered nothing at all and felt a complete fraud standing before this colloquium of esteemed colleagues, most of whom, at week’s end, were exiting the surgical theater.

As I waited for the elderly woman upon whom I’d performed the day’s final demonstration (a double iridectomy) to awaken from the chloral I’d
administered — I’d begun to fear I’d murdered the poor unfortunate — Dr. Zamenhof descended the aisle and approached my lectern in order to thank me for what he said had been an enlightening week. “I had absolutely no idea, no idea of the advances Major Smith had made in the Punjab treating pterygium!” he told me. “Absolutely none at all!”

As he offered me his hand, it was all I could do not to giggle. It’s difficult to credit my reaction, but there was something silly about the man. His pale eyes glittered merrily behind his tiny spectacles, and his beard, an elegant square, was parted fussily down the middle. (Once a fiery red, it seemed to have burnt down to a crisp grey ash along its edges.) Scrolled towards their ends, his mustaches lent him a hint of flamboyance without turning him into a dandy, and his eyebrows, flown perpetually at high mast, inflected his face with a perpetual air of wonderment. Were it not for the great hairless dome of his cranium, I might have thought he was a child masquerading as an adult, sent in to the surgical theater as practical joke, although, of course, I knew of no one who might play such a joke on me.

His voice was high and quavering; his manners, fusty; his clothing, old-fashioned though meticulously cared for (a sure sign of poverty, I told myself). Nevertheless, something about him reached me in the depths of my Arctic loneliness. I found my mood lightening in his presence, and when he asked for directions to Papagenogasse, I surprised myself by offering to accompanying him there.

“Splendid! Excellent!” he cried. “I don’t wish to rush you. Your patient has not yet recovered from the chloral. However, I’m afraid I’m late as it is for a meeting.”

“A meeting?”

“Hm,” he said. “With a group of language enthusiasts.” And for some reason, he blushed.

STROLLING ALONGSIDE DR.
Ludovik Leyzer Zamenhof was a bit like walking beside a potbellied stove: there was something warming about his company. My ear had not yet dulled to the comical element in his voice, and each time he spoke, I found myself giggling. As he scurried through the maze of our city in his black bowler hat and his black frock
coat, he reminded me of a character from a fairy tale, a mouse, perhaps, that had been transformed into a man, and no one seemed more delighted by this transformation than the little mouse himself. He seemed to be what Frederick Eckstein, in a lecture I’d recently attended on the
Kama Sutra
(hoping in my loneliness to reacquaint myself with his sister), had called a vidushaka, that rare fellow the mere sight of whom makes one want to laugh.

These were difficult times for him, he said, and although he was recounting to me the story of his failures, he did so with such good humor that neither of us could help laughing. His original practice, somewhere out on the frozen Russian steppes, had failed. He was ashamed to admit it, but he’d been consistently outearned by a local faith healer called Kukliński. The few patients who did seek him out were often too poor to pay him, and it was he who, upon leaving their hovels, would press a ruble or two into their hands. And when a patient died, he renounced his fees completely. “How could I accept their ruble without a cause?” Eventually, he abandoned generalized medicine for ophthalmology, “a branch of our medical arts in which even the sickest of patients reliably fails to die,” but his new practice in Grodna collapsed when a second oculist moved into town. Now, at the urging of his father-in-law, he had returned to Warsaw. Worn out by competitors, he’d opened his shop in the poorest of neighborhoods, tending to the poorest of Warsaw’s Jews, half-blind vitamin-starved wretches with recourse to no other physician. As a consequence, his practice was booming, although few of his patients could pay him in cash. Instead, in exchange for his services, he accepted milk and butter and eggs and cheese.