ruminations: I must know who the patient’s father is! I thought. To which I replied (to myself), No! It doesn’t matter who the father is. Yes, it does matter (I contradicted myself). Maybe Rosensaft truly is the father. And the patient should seek him out, learn more about her origins. No! She should retain her sense of mystery! Of self-creation! It doesn’t matter if he is the father! Then again, perhaps it does matter?
Suddenly the therapist’s voice broke through my chain of thoughts.
Remember that you will always wonder over your father, she said to the patient.
(As if she could hear my obsessions!)
This is normal and inevitable, the doctor went on. The best approach is for you to allow the thoughts to arise yet not become attached to them. Do you understand?
(Help me understand!)
Yes, I think so, said the patient.
Have the thoughts, and let them go, said the therapist.
(Let them go. Let them go.)
If you try to suppress the questioning, you will only strengthen your attachment to fragments of “evidence,” and you will come to “certainties” which most likely will be false. So, neither suppress the questions nor—
Become too attached to them, said the patient.
Yes, said the doctor.
(Just let the thoughts circle. Just let them be.)
We must end here, said Dr. Schussler.
I know, said the patient, rising from her seat.
As she did so, the night seemed to rise up with her: the doorman’s taxi whistle with its yearning cry, a truck thundering by, a man happily shouting, See you soon! It was as if we were suddenly lifted up from a deep cave, from its permanent crepuscularity and gloom, and returned to an ordinary, normal night.
The patient left; the sound machine resumed its play. As the elevator doors closed in the vestibule—with their shuss, like a mother’s calming sound—I felt that I had indeed been released, that the doctor had freed me from the spin of my own mind; may God bless her!
And so my thoughts were free to turn to the next session, to Wednesday, to actual happenings: to Maria Gerstner’s story. Which had been suspended at the point at which “the leader” had buttoned up his fly and left her, and she had admired him nonetheless; at the moment when Maria was about to begin her life in a liberated Bergen-Belsen—the patient already growing in her womb.
94.
There had been no Monday-night session. Dr. Schussler had communicated this change of schedule during the langorous part of their last meeting. A seven-day separation might have panicked me. But not now. I was stronger—the doctor had becalmed my mind.
The patient did not set the scene on the tape. After some brief chatting at the opening of the Wednesday session, she simply clicked on the machine and said: Here is what happened next.
I am not sure how I survived the next few days, said Michal’s voice on the recording. I was on my own from the moment … after the encounter I described to you.
By the fifth day, she went on, the British had imposed some order on the camp. The dead were buried in mass graves—tossed in with bulldozers—just as everyone has seen in the magazine pictures. But if you have never seen anything like it before, you can search the depth and breadth of all you have ever learned about language, and you will not find a word or a figure of speech, or a form of rhetoric, to help you pronounce in your own mind what you are seeing.
Said the patient: The BBC radio reporter called it “the worst day of my life.”
Did he? asked her mother.
Yes.
Well, her mother replied as if tossing the word over her shoulder. Maybe for him.
The tape went silent, as if empty, unrecorded. The machine whirred on, for five seconds, ten. There was a cough, probably Michal’s. After which Michal said:
Then there was a miracle.
95.
I sat on the ground in a quiet corner of the camp, Michal continued. This is still the fifth day, I’m talking about. Twilight approaching. But overhead and to the east, the sky was still a clear blue. I could not remember the last time I had simply sat and contemplated the arc of the day.
Then I heard murmuring. At first I thought it was an hallucination, a product of my senses suddenly awakened to the possibility of the loveliness. A murmuring and whispering like the stir of dry grass. But there was no grass anywhere. And then I really did believe the sound arose from my imagination, which frightened me.