Hannah had learned quickly that there were some privileges one did not turn away

Hannah prowls Dr. Werther’s examining room.

On the bookshelf, in front of the leather-bound tomes — Encyclopedia of Nervous Ailments — is a large, ivory snake. She picks it up, runs her fingertip along the serpentine coils. The ivory is cold to the touch. The snake has three eyes. She stares at the third eye, above the other two. Look at me, and you will die, it seems to say.

She lifts it to eye level, and stares into the blankness of the third eye.

Her breath seems to catch, trapped in her chest.

A whiteness spreads around her, a terror of nothingness.

Still her breath doesn’t come and her chest flames. Jailor. The snake weighs heavy in her cupped palms; her arms shake.

She closes her eyes.

Breath comes.

The moment passes.

The blankness is just ivory. The snake is simply a memento from a visit to India. She returns it to the shelf and walks to the opposite wall, where there is a large watercolor. Two small fishing boats in a dock, the water the lightest blue. She can almost hear the gentle splash of the waves. Calm now, she turns to the doctor, gives a small laugh.

“I believe it is only in a mad person’s place that I could have done that.”

“Mad person’s?”

“You know what I mean.” She waves her arms through the air, vaguely encompassing the room, the building, the garden. “Here, in the sanatorium.”

She watches as he thinks for a moment, then decides to let the comment pass.

“Do what?”

“What I want. What comes to mind. Pick up your ornaments. Stare at your pictures.”

He nods and is silent.

She pulls out the chair, and then decides otherwise, and sits on the couch instead.

He removes his monocle and regards her. “You are unsettled this morning.”

“Am I? Yes, I am.”

“In your mind, you are negotiating between what is acceptable here, with us, and the rules of the outside world.”

She leans her head back on the sofa. It is a slightly wrong angle for comfort, but there is something to be said for not having to bear the weight of your head.

“Ernst has already left. He sent a telegram. He’ll spend tonight at an inn or hotel en route. Train, then carriage. By the end of the week, I could be home.”

“His last visit was, what, six weeks ago?”

She nods. Ernst is a good man. Two days travel, back and forth — the expense of it, too — just to sit at her bedside for a few hours, while she studiously kept her silence.

“But you have been writing, have you not?”

Every day, the servant brings the thick, cream writing paper on a tray — such beautiful paper, it is a shame to spoil it — along with a pen. Some of the women weren’t allowed pens, for fear they might thrust the sharp, gold nibs into their arms. Hannah had learned quickly that there were some privileges one did not turn away.

“Dearest husband,

“It is raining in Vienna, and cold. I hope that the weather in Prague is better. This is to let you know that I am as well as can be expected. Please send my fondest regards to Felix and Emmy.

“Your wife, Hannah.”

She swivels to face him. “Oh, the wording changed along with the weather. But you get the general idea. And now I am supposed to return to being a cosseted, obedient wife. To my old life.”

Dr. Werther shakes his head. “In some manner, yes. You will return to your old life. But at the same time, no. For you have changed. And you will take that change with you.”

A knock on the door. A nurse puts her head around, her cheeks flushed red.

Dr. Werther frowns. He is loath to be disturbed when he is with a patient, Hannah knows, they all know.

“I am terribly sorry to disturb you, doctor. It is just that…”

“Yes?”

Dr. Werther stands up and threads his fingers together, resting his hands upon his chest.

“It is just that… Mrs. Schwebel’s husband has arrived. All the way from Prague. And he was quite insistent that you be informed of this at once.”

She receives him in the sitting room, especially set aside for guests. It is the furthest wing from the new inmates, with their moans and screams and sometimes wild hair.

Bad autumn rains had delayed the journey, he says as he comes in, spotlessly clean as always, but filled with stories of mud splattering over the horses’ legs, of riding through storm and thunder, the carriage swaying wildly, just so that he could get here.

She sits with her hands demurely on her lap, laced into her velvet dress. “A real frau,” the servant girl told her admiringly. She had thought she would have lost weight, being here. The first few weeks she barely ate the porridge they fed her, spoon by spoon, carefully sweetened with rich man’s sugar. But it seems she has enjoyed herself, despite it all, for her dress is snug around her ribs.

Ernst takes off his hat and places it carefully on the small, round wooden table to the side. His silver-topped walking stick leans against the wall. She looks up at him. The silver tuft of hair to the left of his crown. His bright blue eyes. His perfectly shaven chin, the skin that looks slightly leathery. Something in her softens.

“Thank you for coming,” she says. There is a tightness in her throat, and she must force out the words. They compete with another thing — tears, maybe?

And then there is her stomach.

“Of course, my dear. I have been waiting for this day.”

She smiles, a half-smile. But he returns it all the way, his eyes crinkling and his lips pushing up toward his cheekbones. It catches her and she widens her smile in return.

“I trust that you are well.”

The words are meant in kindness, of course they are. But something in her flinches. “Quite well, thank you.”

“And ready to return home to us?”

No. She is terrified to return home. This place has become her home, her womb, perhaps. A place filled only with women and kindness. A place where they are fed like babies, and they can wander in the large garden and feed the hens. They can read and talk and write. They can cry. They can even shout in anger.

Here, they are not simply wives who know whom to place next to whom at a dinner, and how to muster up an elegant flower arrangement even in winter, and what to instruct the maids. They are not simply wives who pile on layer upon layer of silk and velvet, who jam hats upon their heads, covered and covered and covered until what is inside is first stifled, then strangled.

What was it that Dr. Werther said? That there is nothing wrong with her mind, only with her heart.

“Of course I am ready to come home. And so eager to see the children.”

She looks out the window. The September rain dribbles down the glass, and although a cheerful fire is burning in the grate, she shivers, suddenly. Winter has come early this year. “It is only that, I would so like to do the journey when the sun is shining.”

He laughs. “Oh, my little pet. Rabbits like the sun, do they?”

“Perhaps by Sunday the rain will have eased? I would not like to catch cold in the carriage…”

If they start out today, they will still be on the journey on Shabbos.

Ernst picks up his gray top hat and twirls it.

“That is rather a lot of rehearsal to be absent for.”

They might stop at an inn, of course. But something in her shivers at spending Shabbos without her candlesticks, without challah, with only the comfort that they have not transgressed.

“Although I am sure that my parents would be glad were I to stay a few days with them here.” He tips his head, as if weighing the possibility.

“Still, if we start on Sunday we will only be home by Tuesday. We’re working on some Paganini. Devilishly difficult violin parts. Trust an Italian.”

Her old submissiveness is creeping over her. She searches her mind. Tatte once told them about a succah on a camel, a succah on a boat. Did that mean that there were some circumstances in which it was permissible to ride on the holy Shabbos? If your husband and children needed you, for example? She rubs her forehead. If only her head was clear and sharp as it once had been.

He watches her. He is a good man. He doesn’t realize what he is doing.

She is too quick to take his side. That is what Dr. Werther said to her.

Suddenly, tears come.
She lets them fall, making dark circles as they fall on the burgundy velvet of her skirt. Ernst reaches to his pocket for a handkerchief. He hands it to her. Her fingers graze the embroidered initials of his name. E. S. Her own needlework. She brings the handkerchief to her face, feels the scratch of linen against her cheeks. Gertrude is adept at the laundry it seems, even without her supervision. The thought makes her cry some more.

And then Ernst is kneeling beside her, looking up at her. And something calms inside. For all his foreign ways, she had forgotten the kindness that is always there in his eyes.

“Hush, Hannah. Don’t cry, now. If you want a few more days to rest here, then we shall set out for home on Sunday.”

He shouldn’t have taken Mama’s Shabbos candles. Even though, without her here, they’ve been standing unused. Every Friday night, he thinks that Papa will light the Shabbos licht. Papa thinks that the job belongs to Emmy, as the daughter, the only woman of the house. And Emmy assumes that Felix, being the spiritual one of the family, will light the candles.

The result, of course, is that by the time they realize that one of them must take the horse by its bridle, the horse is already in the stable. Or has run off the field. Depending on which way you want to play the metaphor. Sundown has come and gone. And to light candles after sundown would be a contradiction in terms. A piece of circular reasoning that never ends because it never starts.

Putting that aside, the candles are flickering beautifully.

And the lamps were hurting his eyes.

He looks down at the stack of papers in front of him. His dissertation. With the light of the candles, he can sit and write and write. He has set aside all evening.

He looks at the title. Rational Man versus Religious Man.

Reason or religion. The French believed it was one or the other. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Man is his mind. Religion is… what is it that young fellow, the obnoxious one, a Jew of course, is saying?

Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes.

Religion is the opiate of the masses.

Marx. They say he got drunk, laughed in church, and rode through the streets on a donkey. Still, even disregarding the man, his words deserve a refutation.

Felix lays down his pen and rubs his eyes. He has never used opium, though plenty of students have told him that it would open his mind to a higher world.

He supposes it is something to do with his mother. His friends think so. Wilhelm calls him “Mama’s boy.” Hans ruffles his hair.

Felix, concentrate. Can religion conform to the rational mind?

He lifts his arms, stretches, then pushes back his chair and stands. He shoves the papers to the side of the table and blows out the candle.

Even if it can, even if he can concentrate for long enough, and bend and stretch his mind enough to answer, will it really matter? These papers will just be another manuscript gathering dust on some bookshelf in the University of Prague, another Jewish philosophy student who thinks he can become the next Moses, the man with all the answers, when there are no answers at all.

to be continued...

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 670)