there and never have to think of compromise, defeat, embarrassment. Go there and simply enjoy it without a moment’s thought that you are betraying your people. How can you not understand? I wanted to give you merely what Rosensaft and Bimko stole for themselves: Forgetfulness. Obliviousness. The ability to live, without guilt or sense of obligation, among those who murdered your family. Whereas … if you were my daughter … if you were a Jew …
If? intruded the patient. What is this “if I were”? I am your daughter, and you do admit that, don’t you?
The clock slashed away at the seconds.
There is nothing to admit, said Michal at last. Admit—as if it were a crime. Yes. You are my daughter.
So I am your daughter. Born in Bergen-Belsen. Given away to a priest. But you at least agree: I am—
My daughter. Do you need me to say it again?
I do. I need you to say it!
Yes. I cannot say it more directly than this: You. Are. The. Daughter. I. Gave. Away. In. Belsen.
Therefore, said the patient, I am the daughter of a Jewish woman. So then: How can I not be a Jew?
You are not a Jew just because I bore you.
A Jew is something I am!
No. It is not inherited—
—everyone believes it is.
So to hell with them. That is some nonsense made up by racists and old rabbis. In any case, why does anyone have to know anything about it? It is no one’s business. You just decide! Decide right now. You simply do it. From then on, you are what you always thought you were: Protestant. Protestant!
Michal slapped the table.
Make up your mind to it, she said. Now. Then it’s done, finished, over: You are not a Jew!
109.
And what followed, in Michal’s next breath, were the shouted sentences with which this encounter was fated to end:
Do not look for me again! she cried out. I beg you: Never again try to contact me!
Yet now we heard those words in a different light.
The patient clicked off the tape recorder, then said nothing for ten or fifteen seconds. The sounds of the night rose from the street: the complaint of the hotel doorman’s taxi whistle, the church carillon playing the three-quarter hour, cars idling on New Montgomery Street. From deep inside our building came its systemic hum.
You know, the patient said finally. I really can’t think of her as my mother. She threw me out of her life—twice—and what sort of mother does that? No. She is not a mother. Not really my mother.
Said Dr. Schussler: Yes. That is right. She is not a mother to you.
But I can’t hate her, the patient said. Because she hates her own life more than I could ever hate her. I think she really believed she was saving me from it, from her, from everything that had happened to her.
Dr. Schussler hummed in agreement.
It’s sad, said the patient.
Sad how? asked Dr. Schussler.
The patient hesitated. Then she said:
The whole story is more about her than about anything else. It’s the good and the bad news: Her shoving me out was not about me; it was about her.
I see the good news, replied the therapist. But how is it bad?
Oh! sighed the patient. All that angst about should I find her or not. Then, if I wanted to find her, how could I possibly do it. Then, having found her, should I go see her. All that: years of suppression, then examination, then suspense, then action. Funny. And after all that, finding my birth mother turns out to be all but irrelevant.
Whatever I was or wasn’t didn’t matter to her, she went on. Her story and mine do not intersect.
Then both sat silently as the truth of the patient’s statement permeated the night.
We will meet again on Wednesday, said the doctor.
Yes, Wednesday, said the patient.
A long pause followed. The night sounds—the horns, the taxi whistle, the tires whispering by—reinhabited the room as the human voices retreated.
Her story and mine do not intersect.
The patient’s words lingered behind her, rustling in the air like felicitous banners.
And I thought: If only the world could be stopped, right here, in this calm harbor of time, as the patient sails on without her mother. For what a perfect ending we had come to for this chapter of the patient’s life.
FOUR
110.
So did we come to the patient’s final session before the Thanksgiving hiatus. She would break no new ground, I thought, as was normal for analysands on the verge of being