Obersturmbannführer? A stain—which cannot be removed? For I belong to him, to them, my family: the defenders of the murderers of the Jews.
I believe it is from that moment that my determination grew to detach the patient from her adoptive parents, said the doctor. Yes, it was envy, certainly. She would enact for me what I could not do for myself. She could leave her family, find another, a kinder one, perhaps, one more suited to her. How could I know I was throwing her back into … all that.
The doctor sat quietly for a full minute, as the tape whirred and the building hummed from somewhere in its depths. Then she switched off the machine and abruptly left the room—going to the ladies’ lounge, I assumed, since she had neither put on her coat nor taken her packages.
The urge to follow and accost her was overwhelming. I could station myself in the stairwell, I thought, and as she came by—what? What would I do? I had visions of strangling her—with what? My tie? Had I come to that? Could cudgel her … with a phone…?
The phone.
I picked up the handle and dialed the number she had left in her messages for Gurevitch: five, five, two, fifteen, nineteen. At last the nine circled back to its position, at last the connection was made, finally the ringer came alive on the other side of the door. How loud it seemed, shrilling in the empty room in the dead night: five rings, six rings, seven, eight. Finally Dora Schussler’s footsteps sounded in the corridor—nine rings, ten—she ran now to catch the phone, tore into her office, picked up the receiver:
Yes, I know the hour, Helmut, she said breathlessly. I am finishing and will be on my way home now.
(So she still called him Helmut!)
I told you not to worry, she went on.
She paused.
I told you I—
She said nothing for several seconds.
Helmut? she said finally. Then: Who is this?
I only breathed into the phone, loudly, to be sure she knew that someone was there, someone who was not Helmut.
She inhaled as if to speak, then let go the breath. Attend, she murmured in French.
She put down the handle and slowly moved toward our common door.
I put my finger on the hook. I stopped breathing. It had been too loud, my breathing—too loud!
She stood inches from me—I could almost taste the tobacco on her breath. My God, how long could I stand there without breathing?
Suddenly her phone began cawing: the quick, loud shout of a line off the hook.
Sheiss, she whispered, turning away from the door and returning to her desk. Pervert, she spat, as she dropped the phone back into its cradle.
44.
What delight it gave me to taunt her! Yet how I feared that my behavior would expose me. I had to endure Dr. Schussler, I told myself; she was my only conduit to the patient; whatever her errors, whatever her deficiencies, I needed her as badly as did the patient. For the doctor had said the patient would feel “cast out.” And I … I could not contemplate what should happen to me should I lose my dear patient and all her sorrowing goodness.
I went to the office daily during Christmas week and did not encounter Dr. Schussler, which was fortunate, for I was not certain of my self-control, of what I might do should I encounter her alone, without her patients, without my patient. I might … no! Her absence was a relief; although it was with many bitter thoughts that I imagined Dora and Helmut holidaying in some Teutonic cottage in the Austrian Alps, reverting to their Germanic type amidst the sort of people who could very well forget the Obersturmbannführer who oversaw the murder of the Jews of France. My own family—what was left of it after the suicides—would have enjoyed Dr. Schussler’s company, a cultured woman with whom they could share their greasy prejudices, their ugly words dripping from their tongues like saliva from rabid dogs.
Christmas Day itself was much like Thanksgiving: the city deserted but for the lolling alcoholics and desperate Vietnam War veterans. The sale-shopping frenzies followed; then the madness of New Year’s Eve. Office workers had opened their windows to toss the pages of their desk calendars into the street, a practice I had never seen anywhere else. I walked ankle-deep through a snowfall of past appointments, random phone numbers, part numbers, names, addresses, check numbers, dollar amounts, cryptic notations. I picked one up: Give