[10] Culture distracts us, but not enough

Days later, she’ll remember to her grandfather she screamed when she collapsed. I’ll correct her as soon as she says it: she didn’t scream, no, I was there – she didn’t make a sound then. Which tells us both that she felt herself scream, but inwardly, until something snapped and every moment of her mind unravelled.

Mister Rosemeyr jumps from his chair to help me catch her fall, and a man sitting there with a handlebar mustache and a greasy coat gives up his soft chair to her. Two clerks come running, and Mrs Rosemeyr is summoned quickly from the upstairs flat to pat her wrists. Johnny in train, we all carry her upstairs to their flat, except for the stranger, who has vanished.

She begins to collect herself after a few minutes and sits up on the couch. In a voice softer than a whisper, she asks whether Johnny’s safe, then looks without shifting herself while I hold him for her to see. By then a doctor has been summoned. She doesn’t want him there, but she gives in to his questions and lets him examine her and the lad. When he leaves she’s having a cup of tea with Mrs Rosemeyr. We’re all pretending everything’s fine again and that we’ll forget about this soon enough. That was an hour ago. Now?

In the carriage on the way to our flat, helpless. The woken horror, I tell you, to see her tumbling into herself like this, so exposed, so suddenly, to the powers that have reached for her again. I can’t see where she’s going but I tell from a look that she knows this pit is bottomless. At least at the start, part of her is in the moment with me and making grudging sense, but the rest … this force. It starts with a strange barking cough and a laugh I haven’t heard her make before. Her eyes go blank and stop looking out at me, or at Johnny in his travel basket, or at anything else. Some power inside her is pulling her stare inwards. There’s the calm Emma on the outside, too calm, eerily composed, and there’s the one whose inner claws are tearing her apart while I watch. By the time we’re upstairs in our flat, she’s been swallowed from within. She places Johnny on the kitchen table, slams our bedroom door, and begins screaming and laughing as if willing the combination to destroy her.

She was always an angry one, but I’ve never seen the machine that churns it out, as if her mind just now has been stripped of all its skin. The things I’ve forgotten I don’t know about her, that I always told myself I don’t have to know, are bursting out, and they’re audible in her loud, hollow laugh, her wailing tears, and this hacking cough. She hasn’t lost control – what I’m seeing now is in control, and it just swallowed the woman who used to control herself. Her laugh is the worst of it – this savage, murderous laugh at nothing.

We’ve always had our way worked out. She can get as angry as she likes – okay. We have a mutual no-hitting agreement, and we both know what we’d better not say no matter what. When she cries, I don’t try to stop her; I wait her out, and she can tell me why later, if she needs to. Things like that work when you know who the other is. Now? After she slams the bedroom door, I give her a few minutes and then knock. She screams, but it’s her tears that are screaming – they’re tears that yearn to kill. So I don’t come in, and when I step back a little, she senses it and I hear her crying and laughing at the same time.

The next time I knock, I do go in, and … silence. She half-sitting up in bed, with her black robe covering her completely and the hood pulled down over her brow. She’s curled her arms around herself as if the silence has crushed her. What point is her nature trying to make?

‘Emma,’ I say.

She coughs, and laughs, and coughs again. She’ll ruin her voice if she doesn’t stop that.

‘Emma, will you try to tell me what this is –’

She screams. I’ve heard her scream before, but I’ve never heard this one. I close the door again. She’s not out of control. Yes she is, no she isn’t – whatever has possessed her is in control.

An hour later, I’ve changed Johnny’s diaper – the first time, but he needed it, so I swallow my pride for her sake – and tuck him in. It’s all I can think of to do. Emma would have written a shopping list when she got home and rung for the candleman to handle it, so I try to do that, but all I can think of is milk. Nothing is going to fill the time until she lets it. She’s stopped screaming, but her wailing doesn’t stop unless she’s coughing. Twice I walk up to the door, and she howls out a laugh at the sound of my steps. Her laugh is the worst of it – braying, vacant, targetless. I stare at the door and feel her energy distort the air. I have the sense that if I say one word, take one more step, tap her on the shoulder, do anything, the world will implode on her and nothing will be the same for us again.

In the note I sent her grandfather that morning, I asked him to come for dinner. He knocks just after dark, and I start to tell him about it while he’s taking off his coat, but he’s already listening to her laughter and her cough with a questioning frown on his face, and after only a few words he shushes me: May I? He points to the door. He looks in the bedroom and sees her curled up, laughing and coughing. She’s still in her berber robe, buried under the trembling mountain of it. He hasn’t seen this before, but from his weary look, I know he’s seen something I haven’t. Sad and horrified – there ought to be one word for that.

He steps quickly into the bedroom and closes the door. Loving yourself and somebody else at the same time is the hardest thing anyone can do. After all the pride we’ve taken, it’s unbearable that we might be failing each other now. A few minutes later, he comes out. Nothing in there has changed. He searches his own mind for what to tell himself before he looks up and says –

‘Paul, say nothing for a minute. Clear your head, please, give me a moment, and then let me tell you what I know.’

His voice so soft it only reaches one ear. The other listens to her crying and coughing, each sound a stab. Each sob unspeakably sad, each cough like a cymbal clash. People talk about rage as if it’s something that towers, but it can be bottomless too, when it comes from the same place as pain. He points at the kitchen table and we sit side by side at the corner of it, staring together at the bedroom door.

‘I’m not a doctor,’ he tells me in a voice below a whisper. ‘I know this is what she used to see doctors for. Here, give me his dinner.’ I take Johnny’s bottle from the stove and pass it to him. He shakes a few drops from the nipple onto his wrist, winces, and waits for it to cool.

‘There’s no mystery to the heart,’ he tells me. ‘There are only good reasons we can never see. To her, I promise you, this is sensible. And it isn’t the devil, whatever you think she sounds like.’

He tests the bottle again, nods just so, cradles Johnny in his arm.

‘It’s not for me to know what she tells you or doesn’t,’ he says. ‘It has to be enough not to know everything about the one you love. But there were six months or so, after I met her but before she met you. She didn’t know I existed until I just went to her one day and introduced myself. You know that?’

‘That much, yes. There’s years of her life she won’t talk about much. That’s okay. I still try to guess.’

‘My daughter-in-law wouldn’t allow grandparents,’ he explains, as if the story needed repeating. ‘I found Emma on my own and, well, she decided to trust me, and she told me things. No, not about what’s inside her – she’s like most of us: she hasn’t much idea what makes her do things. But she told me a lot about what she’d seen. The six months before she met you is how much time she had to do that … Look, won’t she be happy?’

Johnny’s reached for his bottle’s nipple, fingers of his right hand curled around it and pointing it towards his mouth. He stuffs it in his mouth and bites down hard with his left hand burrowed under his knitted jumper.

‘She tells me what she must, for her own sake,’ I say. ‘It’s never had to be everything.’

In the next room, she knows we’re talking about her. We might as well be shouting in her ear. I watch him cringe while she wails, the same as me. Then he stiffens his mind again.

‘She’s getting worse while we’re both here, Paul. The coughing, the broken voice, the other things besides, like deep headaches and hemiplegia – that’s paralysis of one side.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s started tonight. She can’t move her right side when this happens. It’s an old symptom. She was being treated for hysteria till a few months before we met.’

‘I know, and that she used to go on cures.’

We wince in unison and cover our ears. She’s trying to deafen us even to our own whispers. We exhale in tandem.

‘It’s what they were for, Paul. Hysteria and this unshakeable sense of being worthless. The symptoms are mostly medical, so people who are diagnosed with it go to medical doctors. It’s almost always young women who suffer from it. She was rising out of it when I entered her life. All of it stopped after she met you.’

You want to think that goodness brings happiness and that he deserves better than this. That’s some of what I’m telling myself. The rest is that he knows portions of this that I don’t, which helps, even if he doesn’t understand it either.

‘She took treatments for years, Paul, with different specialists.’

‘Which is where she learned to hate doctors.’

‘I’m sure. Shock therapy, water treatment, something called a talking cure, one after another. It was a pastime of her mother’s. She would pick a spa for the season, someplace with good restaurants and the right kind of social connections and a new cure for Emma. Some of the treatments might have helped if she’d stayed with them, but she always refused to go on, or her mother withdrew her before a good effect could take. There was unhappiness in that house, and no one wanted to let go of it. Or no one wanted the others to let go of their own. Better for everyone to be miserable than for one person to be happy – that’s how it is in the Aaronson apartment.’

‘I know.’ Emma could never have said it so simply. You had to say it simply for her.

‘And with her height,’ he said, ‘and her looks, there was nowhere in that family for her to hide how little she wanted to be like them. After her mother found an excuse to move her out of their home, to that boarding school –’

‘– for troubled girls. She won’t walk on that street –’

‘– the symptoms began to vanish by themselves. That was around when we found each other. And then she found you, and I told myself, “Well, there – she can leave behind whatever brought her to this.” Even so, I’m always half-thinking about her earlier past when we’re together. I wonder where it went, since I didn’t really watch her escape it – not all of it. I’m sorry, Paul.’

‘I think we won’t tell her mommy and daddy.’

He looks horribly sad to agree with me so quickly.

‘She’s fleeing her life when she’s like this,’ he tells me. ‘That’s something to rejoice for perhaps thirty seconds, until the solution turns out more painful than the suffering that made her try it. She has the power to do this to herself, but the power to stop? Who knows where she’ll find that? I’m only sure she’ll want to.

‘After she and I met, she told me she had never been allowed an honestly free feeling in her entire life. At a moment she was capable of wanting that, I gave her a place to do it, and then you … That’s how she explained it to me once, just after she met you, when she was trying to explain what you meant to her.

‘Paul, she doesn’t want to be like this. It’s that she doesn’t know how to stop it yet now that she’s started. No one enjoys doing this to themselves, but what’s worse than pain? I ask you that. I’d say that helplessness is worse, because it prevents you from escaping the pain you feel.

‘She needs you and Johnny. She needs her life. If your parents want to deny you that, no one has the right to criticize you for escaping them. Sooner or later, you get older, and if you love them and they love you back, you feel lucky. But if your parents force a decision on you – “Choose between us and yourself” – you have to choose yourself and accept the consequences. Because the consequences open the way to all the other choices that wisdom demands you make. Sooner or later, parents have to let their children go. And that, you know, is something Mrs Aaronson still won’t do. The problem her mother has with you is that you know exactly how to protect Emma from her. And you actually have fun doing it – she hasn’t been able to punish either of you for that.’

‘I don’t gloat.’

‘Neither does Emma, anymore, but her mother knows that you two could rub it in whenever you wanted, which is a power in its own right. Tonight you’re wondering what to do now.’

We wait her out for another silence.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him.

‘I don’t know, either. What made this start, Paul?’

I tell him what I saw that afternoon.

‘She needs a real doctor. You say she fell.’

‘The Rosemeyrs brought one while she was resting there. I don’t know if there are any good doctors. Emma doesn’t think so.’

‘That’s true enough, if you’re Emma. She’s had a terrible time with them. And then after almost dying five weeks ago … So who was the other man at the Rosemeyrs’? She saw him, and now this. That’s what you’re saying. So now you’re telling yourself to find out who he was.’

‘That’s right.’

‘If you think you have to do that …’ He suddenly looks tired. ‘But she returned to herself last time. You and I only gave her a safe place for that. It’s about happiness, Paul – when she wants to be that again, badly enough, she’ll know where it is now. If you and now Johnny help her want that … you know? Do whatever returns her to the love she has for you, even if it means doing nothing. Don’t try to guess what she can’t bear to tell you. Just let her be who she is.

‘But let me also tell you about the other Ninth Quarter girls she grew up near … I know, I know – Emma’s unique like everyone else, but the symptoms? They’re epidemic among women her age in the Ninth Quarter, they have been for years. The medical term is hysteria, but some doctors in this city nowadays are calling it “the Jewish neurosis.” They posit being Jewish as a cause of nervous disorders, as if it’s some sort of punishment the world metes out to our younger women for being born. Or it’s another way for Christians to label us as a race apart. And then for some other people the neurosis is a matter of in-breeding. And then there’s some who use it as proof that Jews will never belong in Europe. No, really, hear me out … Paul, if an illness called hysteria actually exists, it’s about the society she’s had to face every day in this city, no more than that.

‘Hear me out, Paul. These things, maybe you can grasp them. Christians have always wanted us to hate ourselves, and a lot of us do, consciously or not. History is everyone’s lot, not just ours, and the ones who hate us are victims just as much as those they victimize. It used to be you could have yourself baptized and wash off the mark that Christians place on you. Not any more – Jew hating is in the air today, Paul. It’s in the culture, not just the churches, so how can some Jews not breathe it the way so many Christians do? Especially if you’re a Jew who cares too much about passing for a German, which describes my son and daughter-in-law. Some girl takes her first look into that world. That awareness of society’s loathing for your kind can be horrible when you first encounter it. Now what happens if her parents themselves have abandoned their faith? And what if as a barely fledged woman you’re supposed to be weak? Where in a world like that can you find the strength to become yourself? If you can’t find a safe place to do that, you just hold the self-hatred in, keep swallowing it back, till you poison your own soul and self-hatred becomes all you can ever know and your life becomes nothing but a failed escape from pain. Really, the only avenue open then is inner death, but what happens to those who can’t make themselves break that way? They break some other way that feels even worse.

‘Maybe that man who frightened her today is what happened to her. But what good is finding him going to do when she anticipates that man in every Christian she sees? You asked me once why I didn’t leave the Isle of Jews though I could. I’m happier seeing Jews all around me. I’m not terribly devout, but I’m proud of who I am. But I’ve had to earn my pride in a way, in this world, that Christians never have to.

‘You’re worried you’re the problem. You’re not, you know. Something like this would never be about you. She truly does love you, Paul. But how do you express your love at a time like this so that she knows how much? Maybe the solution is here at this table, with the three of you who are a family now. Let her be stubborn. You’re the one who showed her who she is – it wasn’t me. You’re the one who made her leap into the world, knowing she would be safe. That is how we discover the world, by testing it with our deeds. I could never have helped her do that, because I was always at some point going to be her father’s father. You came from outside and proved to her that the outside doesn’t have to be frightening, that fear doesn’t have to rule us. I’d like to sit with her for a few moments.’

‘You’ve done enough.’

‘I’ll never do that. Look at my son, Mr Aaronson to you. When I was raising him, when I had just arrived from Stryj, I was telling myself, “He’s going to succeed in the world,” and by the world, I meant “the Christian World.” Oh, I got him the best education, I found him the links, I force-fed him all the ambition I could. Except for his money, can you think of anyone who would want to be him now? He’s a hollow man, and I can’t think of anything worse. I believe sometimes that I destroyed him, the same way that family tried so long to destroy Emma.

‘It’s possible to doubt whether God exists and still lead a good life. Even a Jew can do that – Judaism is hardly a religion anymore. Christians have ended that by making that Jewish question a cultural one, even a racial one. Even Jews who try to embrace their God have trouble finding him in a city like this. They find him so easy to deny for their own material purposes, for a moment’s social comfort, however delusional that is. The world did this to Emma. Her family was the messenger, that’s all. And all you can do, or I can do, is show her that the safest thing she can do is show her love for you. I think I will sit with her for a few minutes.’

He leaves me with Johnny on my shoulder, dribbling milk down my back. I sit in the dark kitchen and hear him say, ‘Hello, Emma.’ And then nothing but her cough. I stand at the window and look over the canal, the blackest thing in the world I know, straight down. Lights all along the quay, but none of them reach this window.

After he says goodbye, I close the door softly. I hear her coughing, Johnny crying. I tuck Johnny into his kitchen crib and turn on the hall light. I stand at our bedroom door. She’s leaning against the headboard with pillows under her back, hugging her robe close, the hood pulled forward though I can see her eyes glittering from deep under it. As soon as she sees me she coughs without turning her head away. That look I see is asking, You think this is crazy? I wonder if this is what fear is: try telling yourself sometime, ‘I’m losing the woman I love.’ This thing that happened to her is a place I don’t know how to find. I can understand for a minute how the desire for death comes to us. When I imagine death, it starts with a black room like this. I’ve never felt so horribly sad in front of her. So I turn on the ceiling light and yank the blanket from her so that she almost tumbles to the floor with it.

‘This makes me sick,’ I shout at her. ‘Everything about us was a joke from the start. That’s all I see right now. We really played a trick on ourselves, didn’t we? Didn’t we? For all those years? Except the joke’s all yours, Emma. It’s you who fooled everyone about being tough. All we’ve been to each other, everything we’ve built together, it’s over, because if this is what you really are, if this is what you want to be, you’re worthless to everyone I care about, including yourself. That’s what you look like right now – worthless to everyone. You used to be nothing without a cock inside you and you can’t even do that anymore. And now? I don’t have a wife, Johnny doesn’t have a mother, you don’t have a husband. All you’ve get left is the people who did this to you in the first place. Do you know what I see? Nobody’s nothing, and you’re acting like you’d rather die than act like you’re worth something. We’re not going to join you in that. So choose what you want, then leave if you have to.’

I slam the door, think twice and shove it open again, and go sit in the kitchen. A moment goes by and slam she’s got up to shut it again. I hear her starting to wail again, louder than before, while I’m thinking: ‘In the kitchen there are three knives and a gas stove, and the drop from the window is eight storeys. The canal ice is six inches thick this week, I could chop a hole.’ Maybe it isn’t a black room over there. She told me last month that it isn’t. Then I hear a loud, harsh croak –

‘Paul? Paul, I’m so sorry. You’re right. Please forgive me.’

A string of coughs rips the air between us.

‘I said help yourself or fuck off and get out!’

‘Paul, it hurts …! I want to die. What have I done to myself?’

‘You help yourself, Emma.’

A string of coughs like a spray of bullets, that hollow laugh. Those kill like magic, just like words. Why haven’t I moved?

‘Paul, why don’t you come to me? Oh God, I’m about to die. What have I done?’

I stride down the hall and push the door open. She’s turned off the light again, and there’s her robe on the bed, the mountain of it. One step in and tha –

[[ chapter 11 on 14 February ]]