A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell

Author:Joseph Skibell [Skibell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780715644638
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co

CHAPTER 4

On Monday, as I knew it must, a note from Papagenogasse arrived for me at the clinic. I put off opening it for as long as I could, stashing the envelope in my pocket but immediately taking it out again. I hid it beneath a pile of patients’ charts and managed to forget about it for all of ten minutes. I was on the point of placing it in my medical bag when my hands, acting on their own, picked up a letter opener and tore the envelope to shreds.

With the deepest of apologies, Fraŭlino Bernfeld begged to be forgiven for the forfeiture of our lesson for the day. On Tuesday, it was the same: “Morgaŭ, morgaŭ, mi promesas!” However, the morrow brought only another lavender note, and this one, instead of begging off for the day and promising me the morrow, canceled our lessons until I should hear from her otherwise.

I wasn’t surprised. When had my love life ever run smoothly?

Having failed to thwart the will of my own father, a petty tyrant with no real power, what hope did I have, standing against Herr Bernfeld, a man of actual substance and means? Still, I kept up my daily Esperanto studies, telling myself that there was no point in falling behind from despair, although who was I deceiving? I had no one to speak the language with, and in any case, I could barely concentrate on my studies. I began a translation into Esperanto of Dr. Freud’s new book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, but lost heart early on when I came across the aliquis dialogue, a barely fictionalized account of my first conversation with him, designed obviously to eradicate all further traces of me from his life. I lived through my days like a sleeper who forces himself to remain in bed, hoping to begin redreaming a beautiful lost dream. Every hour, I checked the post, and when finally I received a letter from the Bernfeld residence on Papagenogasse, it was not in its customary envelope nor, as I saw when I’d opened it, was it in Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s pretty hand. Instead it was a note from Herr Bernfeld himself, summoning me to his club:

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