37
From the journal of Dr. Max Liebermann
Today I saw Clara, the woman I once loved. Or perhaps I should say the woman whom I thought I once loved. The woman who by now would have been my wife, had I not broken off our engagement. It is a strange consideration. Marriage. She looked stunning, coming out of the Imperial in the company of a handsome lieutenant. I had heard rumors, of course. They say she met him at a sanatorium in the Tyrol where her father had sent her to convalesce. I had always derived consolation from this news. It served to assuage my guilt. I couldn’t be held responsible for ruining her life. Indeed, she might find true love with her lieutenant, and be patently much happier than she ever would have been with me. I wished her well, because if she found happiness in the arms of her handsome lieutenant, then my judgment would be vindicated. There, you see? It was for the best, after all.
So why is it, I wonder, that when I saw them together today I felt so ungenerous, so empty of goodwill? They stepped out of the Imperial, and the lieutenant hailed a cab. Clara was smiling. She was wearing a long fur coat with a matching hat and looked like a Russian princess. A cab pulled up, and the lieutenant helped her inside. As she ascended the step, he held her gloved fingers in one hand, and pressed the small of her back with the other. It was casual contact, accomplished with careless, practiced ease. He was used to touching her, and she was used to being touched. As the cab rolled off, I saw them kiss. A merging of shadows in the frame of a small window, glanced a moment before the curtain swished across to protect her honor.
It left me feeling excluded and horribly alone: standing on a corner, a revenant, or less-a voyeur-blinking into a gritty, chill wind. I remembered kissing her: the desire, the wanting. She was, and remains, a very beautiful woman. She was not right for me, and I was not right for her. I know that. I knew that then and I know that now. Even so, when I go to bed this evening, I will be going to bed alone. What have I replaced marriage with? An obsession. A fetish. The pursuit of a woman whose inaccessibility is equaled only by that of the stars. I am no different from some of Krafft-Ebing’s cases. Excepting, perhaps, that their erotic lives are more satisfactory than mine! At least they have real outlets, whereas I appear to have none at all.
Amelia Lydgate was my patient. Her hysterical symptoms arose from a sexual trauma, the unwelcome advances of a man in whose household and care her parents had thought she would be safe. Miss Lydgate has now placed her trust in me. If I attempt to become intimate with her, will this not re-create elements of the very situation that made her ill? I wonder, what correspondent memories would a passionate embrace arouse in her mind? Schelling, stealing into her room at night and attempting to force himself upon her? The mattress tilting as he crawled over the bed, the suffocating weight of his body? How can I make my feelings known to such a woman, knowing as I do what she has experienced?
38
Rabbi Seligman awoke and saw his wife’s face looming over him. He had dozed off while reading in an armchair next to the fire.
“Wake up!” She shook his shoulder. “Wake up. Kusiel is here.”
“Kusiel?”
“Yes, Kusiel. He says it’s urgent.”
The rabbi got up from the chair and shuffled out into the hall, where he found the old caretaker.
“It’s happening again,” said Kusiel. “You must come.”
Seligman signaled that Kusiel should lower his voice. Taking his coat from the hall stand, he called out to his wife, saying that he wouldn’t be long. The two men stepped out into the night and walked the short distance to the synagogue. The Alois Gasse Temple was dark, except for the eternal light that danced in front of the golden edifice of the ark. Kusiel lit a paraffin lamp.
“It’s been terrible. It’s like something’s being tortured up there.”
The old man rolled his eyes.
Seligman listened. All that he could hear was his own pulse hammering in his ears.
“I can’t hear anything.”
“Wait… and you will.”
The silence unfurled like a bolt of cloth, accumulating in suffocating, heavy folds. It was unyielding and contained within its emptiness a foretaste of oblivion.
“Perhaps you have been working too hard,” said Seligman. “You might have fallen asleep and had a dream.”
“There is something here, Rabbi. Something unnatural.”
Kusiel’s expression was resolute.
Time passed, and Seligman allowed himself to feel less anxious. Perhaps the old man really had imagined the noises after all. The hammering in Seligman’s ears slowed. He was just about to say I’m going home when there was a sound that trapped the words in his throat: a deep, loud groaning. The quality of the vocalization suggested not so much torment-as Kusiel’s reference to torture had suggested-but rather rage or anger. There was something brutal about its depth and fury, like the bellow of a taunted bull.
The whites of Kusiel’s rheumy eyes glinted in the darkness.
“It’s upstairs, Rabbi. Come. You must confront it.”
Seligman’s legs were weak with fear. Was it possible? Had some demonic entity found a home in his synagogue? No! He was letting the old caretaker’s credulous talk get to him. There would be a rational explanation. He took the paraffin lamp from Kusiel and climbed the stairs to the balcony.
When they reached their destination, there was a loud thud: the floorboards shook.
“It’s coming from behind there,” said Kusiel, pointing to an old door.
The two men looked at each other, amazement mirrored in both their faces.
“Impossible,” whispered Seligman.
“It hasn’t been opened in years,” said the old man. “Your predecessor lost the key.”
“Was there anything in there?”
“No. It’s just an empty attic space.”
Lumbering steps and another bellow: impatient stamping. The cacophony conjured a picture of something mythic and bovine in the rabbi’s mind. Seligman moved closer to the door. He reached out and clasped the handle, but as he did so, whatever was on the other side crashed against the woodwork. Seligman released his grip as if he had been electrified, and sprang back. He steadied himself by grasping the balcony rail, his legs shaking.
“I am g-going,” he stammered.
“Shouldn’t you do something first?” pleaded Kusiel.
“No,” said Rabbi Seligman. “I’m calling the police!”
39
Liebermann spent the entire morning seeing patients. He was on his way back to his office with a number of case files under his arm when his friend and colleague Stefan Kanner stopped him in the corridor.
“Ah, Maxim, I’d buy you lunch, but I very much doubt you’ll be free to accept my kind offer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s someone waiting for you.”
“Who?”
“A policeman,” said Kanner, adopting a comic expression. “But you can still get away, of course. We can leave by the back entrance, have a leisurely schnitzel in Josefstadt, and be at the Westbahnhof by two. You’ll be in good time for the Munich train, and I’d recommend changing at Paris for London. They’ll never find you!”
Liebermann smiled and walked on.
When he arrived at his office, a constable was waiting outside. The young man looked very conspicuous in the bare hospital corridor.
“Dr. Liebermann?”
“Yes.”
“Constable Mader, sir. I was sent here by Detective Inspector Rheinhardt of the security office.”
Liebermann assumed that the constable was the bringer of bad news.
“Has there been another murder?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Inspector Rheinhardt would like you to join him in Leopoldstadt.”
“But why? What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened, as such…” The constable took off his spiked helmet and brushed his hair back. “More like… something’s been found.”