They trade some irrelevant information that reveals nothing, and then go their separate ways. Ascherbach hands the boy a business card with an address, and he looks at it for a long while.
He does not tell Gitla-Gertruda about this meeting. In the evening, however, as they are working on their article for the newspaper in Berlin, he returns to it, like a vision—a certain night in Rohatyn, as he was walking along in the dark through the market square to the Shorrs’ home. The faint starlight that only promised some other reality, but did not even illuminate the path. The smell of the rotting leaves, the animals in their pens. The chill that got into your bones. The foreignness and indifference of the world contrasted with the great trustfulness of those little huts lying low to the ground, the short fences grown over with dry ropes of clematis, lights in the windows, miserable and uncertain—all of it contained in the rotten order of the world. That is, at any rate, how Asher saw things then. He has not thought of it in ages, but now he cannot stop. So Gitla, disappointed by his distraction, writes alone, mercilessly smoking up the whole salon as she does so.
That evening, Asher is overwhelmed by the melancholy of those days. He is irritated; he has a lemon balm infusion prepared. Suddenly it seems to him that aside from all those lofty theses printed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, beyond light and reason, beyond human power and freedom, there remains something very important, a kind of dark ground with the sticky consistency of cake batter onto which all words and ideas fall as though into tar, losing their shape and their meaning. The lofty tirades from the newspaper sound as if they had been spoken by a ventriloquist—indistinct and grotesque. From everywhere comes something like a chuckle; perhaps at one time Asher might have thought that it was the devil, but nowadays he doesn’t believe in such things. He remembers what Gitla said—a shadow, something well-lit casts a shadow. That is what is disturbing about this new idea. Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.
Of the healthful aspects of prophesying
Asher is sometimes called in the evenings for other ailments. Someone must have recommended him, for the local Jews, and in particular those who are secretly inclining toward assimilation, many of whom come from Poland, from Podolia, summon him not as an optician, but as an excellent doctor who can treat every concern, however shameful and strange.
This happens because in these spacious tenement houses, in the bright rooms, there come to be heard old demons, as if bursting from the seams of the clothes people wear, from the souvenir tallitot passed down from their grandfathers, from the velvet jackets once woven by their greatgrandmothers, embroidered with red threads. These tenement houses are usually the homes of wealthy merchants and their numerous families, well assimilated, more Viennese than the Viennese themselves, selfsatisfied but only on the surface, for in reality, they are the most insecure, and the most lost, of all.
Asher pulls the handle and hears on the other side the sound of a bell, pleasant to the ear.
The girl’s worried father grasps his hand in silence; her mother is one of the daughters of the Moravian Jew Seidel, a cousin of the Rohatyn Shorrs. They lead him straight to the patient.
The illness is strange and not particularly pleasant in nature. It would be preferable to hide it somehow, so that it would not assault eyes accustomed to lovely heavy curtains, to wallpapers of classical design, now so fashionable, to the gracefully curving legs of coffee tables and Turkish carpets. And yet the heads of these families do come down with syphilis, infecting their wives, while their children get scabies; respectable uncles and proprietors of large companies drink so much they pass out, and their exquisite daughters sometimes wind up pregnant by who knows whom. And that is when they summon Rudolf Ascherbach, who becomes once more Rohatyn’s Asher.
That is how it is here, too, in the home of the merchant Rudnitzky, who started out manufacturing buttons and now has a little factory outside Vienna that sews uniforms for the army. His young wife, whom he married as a widower, has taken ill.
He says she has gone blind. She has shut herself inside her room, and she has been lying there in the dark for two days, afraid to move lest all her blood escape her with her monthly bleeding. She knows that warmth can be favorable to hemorrhage, and so she does not permit her stove to be lit and covers herself with only sheets, which in turn has made her catch a nasty cold. She keeps lit candles all around her bed, since she wants to be able to make sure there is no blood coming out of her. She doesn’t speak. Yesterday she tore off a section of her linen sheet and made herself a tampon, which she stuck between her legs, hoping to plug in this way any hemorrhage that might befall her. She is afraid that defecating might also bring about a hemorrhage, so she has not been eating, and she has been blocking her anus with her finger.
The merchant Rudnitzky has conflicting feelings about this—he is dying of anxiety, and yet at the same time he is embarrassed by the illness of his young wife. Her madness frightens and appalls him. If it came out, he would lose his reputation.
Dr. Ascherbach sits down at the edge of the couch where she is lying and takes her hand. Very gently, he begins to talk with her. He is not in a hurry; he permits her drawn-out silences. This soothes her nerves. He can bear the silence that now reigns in the stuffy, dark, cold room. Without realizing it, he starts to stroke the patient’s hand. He is thinking about something else. That the crumbs of human knowledge start to come together like chain links, one linking with the next, unbreakably. Soon it will be possible to cure every disease, including ones like this. But right now he feels helpless, he doesn’t understand her ailment, he doesn’t know what is behind it, and the only thing he can give this poor, thin, unfortunate girl is his own warm presence.
“What is the matter, child?” he asks. He pats her head, and the patient starts to look at him.
“Could I open the curtains?” he asks quietly.
Her answer comes resolute: “No.”