Rabbah created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: 'Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.'
- Talmud, Sanhedrin 65B
Herr Doctor Altermann was trying to persuade Yasha Schulevitz that life was neither good nor bad, but what Yasha imagined it was; Yasha parried, trying to convince the good doctor that society, mankind, the very earth both he and the doctor trod upon, was evil to its foundation. The doctor invariably quoted Hamlet in Yiddish and then English: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Then Yasha opened up the valve, quoting nearly every passage in the Bible, the Talmud, and the responsa where human life is devalued and derided, where men and women are likened to fleas and worms and maggots and the days of their lives to fleeting shadows.
Yasha thumped his foot anxiously on the couch, frustrated that he could not see his interlocutor. Doctor Altermann was a dogmatic and unwavering Freudian. He sat behind Yasha as the latter reclined, ridiculously, on a daybed lined with crackling leather. The ontological status of evil was their traditional sticking point. Yasha felt his therapy was going nowhere.
"This is going nowhere," Yasha cried to Herr Doctor Altermann helplessly.
"We should discuss that," the good doctor answered neutrally, but with clinical attention to detail. "Why is this going nowhere? Must this go somewhere? When you first came in here, you couldn't speak or swallow. Now you quote the Maharal of Prague and The Book of Creation to me. Is that getting somewhere?"
::
Yasha was out on the street. Warsaw was stifling. A wave of stark confusion passed over him like a pail of scalding water over the crown of his head. "Is this all there is to existence?" he asked the hot air, he asked the cracked, baking sidewalk, he asked the trolley which stopped in front of him and which would take him to his room.
Yasha hopped on the running board, and as soon as his foot stepped upon the threshold the trolley sped off and Yasha nearly fell to the floor. The driver cursed in Polish. Yasha thought the words were directed at him, but suddenly the trolley came to an abrupt halt and Yasha was pitched to the ground. Now the driver was up on his feet, cursing and screaming in pungent Polish, waving a meaty fist in the air.
Yasha stood and looked out the front window. A horse and wagon carrying rotting produce had halted in the middle of the trolley tracks. The driver pressed the horse with his whip, but the beast refused to move. In one instant it was standing, taking the blows, and in the next, it keeled over on its side and died. Now all the passengers on the trolley hissed and cursed. The trolley could not move an inch forward, and in Warsaw, when a horse dies, a city inspector must be summoned to examine the corpse. It can take hours to remove the carcass. All the passengers noisily abandoned the trolley.
Yasha was the last off the trolley. He stood on the street and looked at the great dead beast. Its tongue had rolled out of its mouth, and its huge yellow eyes bulged from the sockets, like two cracked eggs about to spill their yolks. Yasha had no idea what a dead horse blocking his path may mean, but if it was a dream, and it felt very much like one, he had no doubt it would provide fertile interpretive ground for Herr Doctor Altermann. All it did for Yasha was make his feet hot and sore. So when he reached his flat, he soaked them in some rusty water he drew from the hall tap. It was after an hour like this, sitting on a chair soaking his feet, that he realized Mindel was gone.
::
When he finally noticed, it was not difficult for Yasha to see that she had left for good. Like the girl herself, her things were never well integrated into his life. Her objects - a box given to her by her mother for jewelry, a paperweight a beloved uncle had given her at Chanukah - always seemed to float on the surface of his possessions. She was a girl from the provinces who had read Yasha's book of poems. In a reversal of what was expected, she seduced him. This was the kind of world Yasha had inherited, he thought gravely. The country girl now seduces the city man. She had quickly found an older man with more money than Yasha, and their bond, never firm, had begun to loosen and strain and break.
Yasha looked at the spectacle of smeared distemper on the wall, and his feet, bare white in the chipped enamel pot, swimming in a soup of rusty water. He did not even blame her for not leaving a note. What was there to say? Words would only edify the obvious. The world was open for a girl like Mindel. She could come and go as she pleased without a passport or visa.
But what was left for him in Warsaw? There was a manuscript of unfinished Hebrew poems on the desk, whimpering like a neglected child. When it became apparent to Yasha that he could not finish them, he tried to refashion them in Yiddish in a sort of second first draft. But he did not get much further along in the tongue of his mothers than that of his fathers, so his pen remained in its sheath. Now he just had his sessions with Herr Doctor Altermann and the long, hot Warsaw summer. Yasha was at an impasse with his poetry and an impasse with his therapy. He believed mainly in external reality, while the doctor believed in the primacy of Yasha's thoughts. He saw the doctor five times a week and was charged for missing a session. The burden of analysis was nearly as oppressive as the heat. The doctor and Yasha, after a series of mobile skirmishes, had become fixed in their positions. They charged and counter-charged across a pitted and pocked no-man's land of stated and restated versions of reality, only to retreat to their respective trenches with no clear victory on either side. Yasha was a fighter; he would not let the doctor have his way without a struggle. But he knew the doctor held the advantage; he had the professional training, the conceptual stockpile - and what did Yasha have? He was a poet in a recently revived language whose future survival was far from certain. And anyway the well had run dry, and all that was left at the bottom was sediment and dry bone. He had few tools to fight the doctor. He knew that eventually he would succumb to Herr Doctor Altermann's clinical optimism, and despite the great heat, this chilled Yasha to his core.
When there was a knock on the door, Yasha froze. He imagined it was Mindel, come back to retrieve some item. What if she wanted a scene, in order to enact the fantasy of the lover betrayed? But he doubted it was her. She had not left a thimble behind. What about the doctor? This notion was simply absurd. Yasha had never even seen Herr Doctor Altermann rise from his chair, let alone on the street or in any hallway.
"Who is it?" Yasha called out in Yiddish. One the other side of the door, a man cursed in Polish about the Goddamned Jews. Yasha realized it was safe, and opened the door. It was a man from a private mail courier. He thrust an envelop into Yasha's hand and asked him to sign a slip. As he left, Yasha's eyes followed the man descending the steep steps and muttering slurs about the accursed Jews.
Yasha slit open the envelope. A stack of German Marks fell to the floor. He was about to pick them up when he spied a familiar scrip in a letter inside the envelope. He unfolded it and read:
Dear Yasha,
Father is very sick. Can you come to the Lebenswasser Clinic? Father has asked to see you. Money is enclosed for railway fare. We will take care of your accommodations - Sincerely, Yael Kleinberger
::
Yasha was not pleased to hear of the illness of his former Hebrew teacher and mentor, Rudolf Moshe Kleinberger, but he was overjoyed to so suddenly and unexpectedly leave scalding, grimy Warsaw. He did not notify Herr Doctor Altermann of his departure. His face flushed with glee and shame when he thought of all those missed appointments, and the tally sheet of money growing by leaps and bounds as he dug his heels into the sandy loam of the Alps, far away from Altermann's steely grasp.
With the new regulations in effect in Germany, he expected to be harassed by the German border guards. But when the train reached the frontier and the Polish custom officials saw his passport stamped with a J, it was his own countrymen who removed him from his first class berth. They took him to a low, dim shed and ordered him to strip his clothes as they rifled through his belongings. They quickly found the roll of German Marks, and questioned him again and again if he was smuggling currency. "What is a beggar like you doing with such a wad of Marks?" one Polish guard asked, using the Yiddish word for beggar.
"I told you," Yasha explained, nude and handcuffed to a stiff wooden chair. "I am visiting my sick teacher, the noted Zionist and Hebraist Herr Doctor Rudolf Kleinberger. If you call the Lebenwasser Clinic this can all be cleared up..."
The officials did not believe Yasha, but after five hours they let him go. His train had long departed. On the next train over the border he was forced to travel third class, as the train was full. The bushy-mustached German guard did not so much as blink at Yasha as he stamped the page in his passport. And so, Yasha found himself in Germany.
::
When the train halted in Lebenswasser, Yasha was famished. His German was accomplished, but not vernacular. He read Freud and Schopenhauer and could formally discuss in the German the fine differences between the anal stage and the oral stage, or love as defined in the concept of the will to live. But Yasha had difficulty grasping the harsh phonetics of vernacular German, and when he tried to speak it, he found himself substituting Yiddish words for German. So when he sat at a café in the town of Lebenswasser, he struggled to order breakfast. He thought he had requested tea and sausage, but what came out was a cup of coffee topped with cream and a plate of round, tasteless biscuits. When he asked for directions to the clinic, the waiter pointed down to the river, while Yasha knew full well that it was up in the mountains. By chance he came upon a stooped old couple in front of the town cathedral speaking Yiddish. He asked them the way to the Lebenswasser Clinic and was instructed to take the funicular up the slope behind the town hall.
::
The funicular, clinging to the side of a steep rise, quickly left the muggy river valley behind for the cool breeze of the hilltops. Then it leveled off and Yasha turned around. From the back window, he could see the great expanse of the valley and the blue river at its greatest depth, stretching out in the shape of a lazily written cursive gimel, lamed, and mem, arranged from top to bottom. Yasha imagined that this must be the greatest height above the valley, but then the funicular entered a dark pine forest, and the rise began once more. The forest was a deep, cushioned place of muffled breeze and muted, chirping birds. Every now and again a clearing revealed a thatched peasant hut. As they climbed, the pines grew stunted, their tops sheared. Rock outcroppings thrust out of the earth, studded with moss and lichens. Near the summit of the mount the funicular stopped at a small shelter which bore the name "Lebenswasser Clinic" in Gothic letters on a sign above its lintel. Yasha stepped onto the ground and before he realized it, a young woman was standing with him beneath the shelter. She had a strong and long nose, black, searing eyes, and brown hair cut short and in Parisian style, au garçon. She wore a red and white striped jersey and a long brown skirt. She reached out for Yasha's hand.
"Herr Yasha Schulevitz, it must be you?" she asked in Sephardic-accented Hebrew.
"Here I am," Yasha answered, taking her hand. Unconsciously, he had uttered in Hebrew the same words Abraham used when responding to God's call, just before the binding of Isaac.
"I'm Yael Kleinberger."
"No," Yasha answered, still in Hebrew. "When I last saw you, you were this high! Now you are a woman." The girl blushed to the roots of her hair but did not avert her gaze. She started to speak in German, and then seeing that Yasha was missing much of what she was saying, switched back to Hebrew.
"Come," she said, "this carriage will take us to Father's lodge."