Curtains of the Past
Cottle, Tom
CURTAINS OF THE PAST Yankel Kanter talks about forgetfulness, friendship, sickness and survival TOM COTTLE "Every man has his work," Yankel Kanter told me once over a cup of tea that he had made,...
...Last time I got sick, very sick, too, I didn't see a doctor...
...A positive genius...
...Who can remember now what your clothes looked like...
...I stayed here...
...It was as if his voice came forth out of a mysterious mist...
...A bore, more likely...
...She never once looked at one of my books...
...His report on the Kanters will be continued in future issues...
...In an old suit, way down deep in one of my pockets, I discovered two or three years after I had come here, a piece of paper which obviously had come out of Germany with me...
...the small kitchen area was no more than 15 feet from where he sat, looking down, staring at his hands...
...Must have gone to Harvard...
...The Supreme Court just passed a law that says people on this street have to see a doctor...
...The night I had that conversation with her, three hours, no more than that, after that woman with her illogical logic walked out of my house, comes a knock on the door...
...No more...
...No...
...I hope you're taking good care of yourself," I would say, and let the matter drop...
...And she did...
...I do want to call him...
...Three...
...It's just the living you're concerned about," I offered with some presumption, "but it's the dead you think about, when you let yourself...
...Yankel, this book on logic you wanted to give to Fanny Boehm...
...Fanny Boehm, Fanny Boehm...
...CURTAINS OF THE PAST Yankel Kanter talks about forgetfulness, friendship, sickness and survival TOM COTTLE "Every man has his work," Yankel Kanter told me once over a cup of tea that he had made, a cup of tea we later on in our friendship would laugh about, it was so weak...
...Kanter,' she's crying at me...
...Could be anything...
...You know," Yankel said to me one day "you're a pretty discreet person...
...If I weren't sick I'd work, but I can't so I don't have the money and that's why I don't have a good doctor.' "Now, you're a psychologist, you tell me what I should have said...
...And that's Fanny Boehm, for you...
...Maybe it was a mistake at a cleaning shop, a secret message from a spy...
...Take, for instance, when I'm sick...
...Do you have medical insurance...
...He knew as well as I that he was no more senile than his 36-year-old nephew, Menachim...
...I took a deep breath...
...Yankel, when I told you once you weren't senile, you remember...
...It can't be that in 30 years you haven't seen one doctor...
...There she was, standing over there, right near the bed, not certain whether to come near me, hit me, walk away, jump out of the window, what, and she's starting to cry...
...But a child, children, children less than a year old, no, this should never be...
...But they came here and they saw how poor their fellow refugees were and they felt ashamed...
...Yankel was speaking, only this time I saw that he wasn't looking up...
...Who are you, Fanny Boehm, that you decided one day to fetch a doctor for me, and how come such an elegant one...
...But when Yankel Kanter and I became friends, not just one man interviewing another, I no longer bothered to look away...
...This time, yes, I saw a doctor...
...I wished it had been something, a souvenir, a something that would make me know them again, but it was good it wasn't...
...Yankel," I groaned, "Yankel...
...You'll read it quickly, it's only eighty pages, you can read that in three years, then you'll come back having mastered the relationship between doctors, money, work, and cleaning apartments.' That's what I wanted to say, what I wished I had said...
...I forget the tea, I can't find a single book in my own bedroom, and I scream like a lion when these idiots at the library have the books on the shelves mis-numbered, and now and again I forget where I put my socks, my underwear...
...But there were two things going on...
...It was best to be rid of all the material parts of the past...
...Unspeakable...
...Everybody has their secrets, why shouldn't a cleaning lady who's supposed to clean once a week but who you're lucky to see once a month have hers...
...Everyone does that...
...I don't say you know one, but if you hear of one, maybe in one of the houses where you're working, you'll overhear someone speaking about a good doctor and you can make a mental note of his name, because I could surely use one.' " "But Yankel," I said, not without some hesitation,' 'weren't you putting it on a bit too heavy...
...the street, of course, I knew, although it was not near where I lived, or anybody I knew lived for that matter...
...Fanny Boehm, could you by any chance, on the side, I mean, when you're not cleaning— no, unthinkable...
...I got special tea for you, above the stove," he was calling out to me from the brown easy chair...
...But if you hear of one, you let me know, okay...
...Fanny that one time, it must have been a full moon and Shavuoth at the same time, Fanny comes in...
...You know a Jew who's not an actor...
...Like today I have a cold, in my head, my chest...
...Anyway, I nodded, I played out my scene, and I ended up telling her exactly what she_ wanted to hear in the first place...
...Which one is it...
...After all, he did live alone, except for the woman Fanny Boehm who was scheduled to come in to clean his two rooms once a week but more likely showed up twice a month—that is, if it wasn't one of those months when she or one of the ten million people she knew was sick, which meant she couldn't come in and clean for God only knows how long...
...You must have, because he got the key from you...
...How many, Yankel...
...In the past we did...
...The same window, the same brown chair...
...But suddenly the door opens, which is difficult because it's always locked, and in comes a lovely gentleman, truly, a gentleman, like he should have been in England, not Mattapan...
...You haven't called him yet...
...You have to think: If Fanny Boehm wanted money, why the hell did she clean for people like me...
...How can you collect anything when instead of working twenty, even twenty-five hours a week, you don't work that much in a month...
...You've read it yourself...
...The details don't make a difference...
...She can give her great speech, I can steal the scene with my worldliness...
...It doesn't happen to be the case, but it could be...
...Listen, she can be Molly Picon, I can be Joseph Shildkraut...
...She's German...
...But I yelled back something about appreciating his getting the tea, and letting him know that if by yelling to one another it made it seem as if the apartment was larger than it actually was, I was happy to yell...
...Yankel's just asking leading questions, like a psychologist...
...I heard her once on the telephone outside speaking German...
...I will call him...
...Has a doctor even examined you since you came to America...
...Maybe it was never my suit in the first place...
...But Fanny, you saw this Dr...
...An old letter from my wife...
...Of course...
...consciously he would reach up to see whether his nose was running...
...But with Fanny Boehm there was another thing...
...Then I heard Yankel say just loud enough for me to hear, "Menachim and I are finished...
...Do you mourn yourself, do'you go to your own funeral...
...You know a Jew who can't take the most insignificant little act or gesture and play it up until it becomes for him a matter of life or death, until he has everyone believing it really is a matter of life or death...
...I have new mysteries to deal with...
...You must have...
...What are you doing about it?' That's a genius, no...
...A wife, or husband, yes, that happens too, only it's not supposed to happen until the end of your life...
...Not a half a word...
...I'm a pest...
...You don't want to call him...
...I'm a big boy...
...She's deeply insulted, like a fire gone wild...
...A great many refugees came to this country, you know, with not a small amount of money...
...I have an idea...
...Marlowe...
...Kanter, it must be serious, very serious...
...You're speaking now like a psychologist or a rabbi, tell me...
...In fact, this was the issue that originally stimulated his interest in my getting to know Menachim...
...For him, I'm already dead...
...Nu, who is this at five in the afternoon...
...You're a nudge...
...I felt in my bones she knew a good doctor and was trying to decide in her own mind whether she should let me know his name...
...There's a lot of things you don't ask me which you could, you know, you really could...
...But you aren't that interested, otherwise you would have called him earlier, is that it...
...I'm beginning to think so...
...You see Menachim, and when you get done with him, you come here and we'll talk together about what you two have talked about...
...And why after ten years of no visitors which is an unforgiveable exaggeration since I always have several visitors a week excluding you, does someone have to come on the one day when to get out of bed to answer the door means I'm going to die from a heart attack...
...So you stop and think, maybe she was one of these rich poor ladies...
...With a man like Yankel, one did not speak in terms of what was best for him...
...Don't worry, I pray regularly, if you can call ten seconds for God and twenty minutes trying to remember their faces praying...
...That should be a familiar story for someone in your line of work...
...I interrupted...
...Go make some tea and I'll tell you about my nephew Menachim...
...I would have been delighted if she had...
...How is it that you, the Queen of Medicine, don't know a good doctor?' I figured, what the hell, if I'm dying, I'm dying, I might just as well go out with a good laugh, although don't think I wasn't worried about who I would tell my story to if I did die...
...My daughter wrote me once, maybe that was the letter because all of these things one saved, not because the Nazis would take and burn them, but because in your sentimentality that's what you do...
...The details don't make a difference...
...Some people live their lives as if they were going to their own funerals...
...Yankel looked at his hand, ran his fingers through the thin hair around his ears and proceeded with his story about Fanny Boehm...
...It could be precisely what it was, the name of a woman and an address in Leipzig...
...You could ask me, Yankel, do you see a doctor...
...Excuse me,' he says, 'I'm Doctor Marlowe...
...I felt sad, and I felt, I think, relieved too...
...The truth is I am self-destructive...
...So what could it be, this note on such an unfamiliar looking piece of paper...
...What, I had a lot of money to give her...
...I mean she really got to you...
...A genius too...
...I shouted out...
...My mystery cleaning lady...
...You got to be rich to know a good doctor.' 'But you're always sick, Fanny,' I told her, 'or you're holding the hand of a sick friend, or shlepping someone off to a hospital somewhere...
...I'll still be here...
...lean afford it, everybody around here can afford it, then you'll have more money...
...Do you go regularly...
...This time you have to see a doctor.' 'Nu, Fanny, you got a great one for me?' She has to, I tell myself, she herself is either sick all the time or telling me about one of her 85,000 friends who is always sick...
...I got into your house with Fanny Boehm's key which she said I should leave with you and I'm supposed to examine you.' You want the end of this story...
...Not one photograph, not one letter...
...Who else but a genius could make a statement, a pronouncement like that...
...So, all the story needs is a moral...
...How do you like this...
...He didn't need to...
...You want to read my mind or you want to get me to pray...
...He needs someone like you...
...Or maybe not exactly...
...I didn't ask, but a genius like this has to be from Harvard...
...Fanny Boehm, that's her name, Fanny Boehm...
...Yankel began to laugh...
...He said that...
...So what could it be...
...We all have it...
...I don't know exactly the details, but they managed to salvage a lot of what they had in Poland or Hungary or Germany or wherever they came from...
...Now you know...
...But to experience death is to experience someone else's death, and especially someone who you care a great deal about...
...I'm lucky if I can make it back to my bed...
...Yankel Kanter had moments with me, even amid the joking and the carefree talk or his lectures on any one of a million topics, when his eyes showed an uncharacteristic squint, the corners of his mouth dropped, and unTom Cottle, a clinical psychologist who is also a contributing editor of this magazine, reports periodically in these pages his conversations with real people...
...Maybe it was because if I met him I'd\find out something strange about her, or because then I'd learn that secretly she was very, very rich, which of course she wasn't...
...Isn't that something...
...I'll see Menachim and I'll continue seeing you, and you' 11 continue seeing Menachim...
...I'm not a well man today...
...Why can't it be that I haven't seen a doctor...
...Marlowe gave me a thorough examination, prescribed medicine, returned a half hour later with the medicine, said he would send me a bill which he never did, not even after I sent him a letter requesting a bill, and the medicine gave me relief in less than 24 hours, really, that's all it was, and I was fine...
...What's the worst it can be...
...We don't talk at all any more...
...What difference could they make, the details...
...In this chair I sat down to read it, from light from this window...
...All too familiar," I whispered...
...So they lived like they were poor and they took jobs, like being a cleaning lady, so others would think they were poor...
...The man calls me Mr...
...Instead, I shook my head very seriously, with just a little trace of sadness, too, you know...
...Baseball...
...Has anyone examined you today, this week, this year...
...Maybe I can bring in that guy, what's his name, Columbo, he could come in and solve the mystery of Fanny Boehm for me...
...He was sitting in the big brown armchair near the windows with the light coming in from behind him so that I could not see his face...
...Indeed, on the occasions of my visits when I saw that he was ill, I rarely asked him if he had consulted a doctor...
...Oh, you're right," he answered, sitting up straight in the brown easy chair...
...What's the difference, one, two, three, nobody, your whole family...
...But if you'll accept a little piece of homey advice, you could make a little more money, a lot more money for that matter, if you'd come to work regularly...
...Give me a chance...
...How would I know a doctor...
...She could have taken them out of here by the truckload...
...He knew, too, that I was waiting for us to get close enough so that he might pull back the heavy dark curtains of the past, if only enough to let me know the facts of his wife's death and the death of his one child—or was it three?—in the Holocaust...
...It could be that I haven't seen a doctor since 1945, or since I was born for that matter...
...The possibility is there...
...I tell a few, this one tells this one, that one tells that one...
...Yankel Kanter could make me laugh by doing almost nothing...
...When you lose a parent, that's bad enough, but this you expect...
...You want to know something, I think I was so concerned about remembering to put milk in the tea for you but not sugar, I may have forgotten to dip the bag...
...Worry, worry, worry about everyone else but meanwhile let yourself go to hell...
...It's the living you're concerned about, that's why you will talk to Menachim...
...He tells me, 'You got a bad cold...
...Moral ornot," I chipped in, "you don't take such great care of yourself, Mr...
...I never dared tell him anything as foolish as how it would be better for him to let it out...
...Kanter, Mr...
...Maybe in two months for all I know!' I was just trying to be helpful...
...I must confess, though, I wrote to this woman in Leipzig asking her what her name may have been doing in my pants pocket, but I never heard from her...
...What are you worried, if you get to like him you won't see me anymore...
...That woman, I felt in my heart, did know a good doctor, and for all sorts of reasons was afraid or reluctant to give me that doctor's name...
...Although you never know...
...All the death I want to know is back there...
...It was a big piece of paper too, not a piece of ordinary stationery, but something substantial, I thought...
...That's the whole story...
...Because I think a doctor you would recommend would have to be someone who was the best around...
...I once thought we were the only people each of us had, but no more...
...The woman I never heard of...
...I knew she had...
...But that's easy, or at least / know about that...
...But do you think the next time I saw her I asked about that Marlowe doctor...
...You think I'm senile...
...Draw it out, Yankel...
...I'll make it short because it's short...
...Bad enough you have yourself, your memory of the past, that's enough of a souvenir...
...This time there was no mistaking the phrase that inadvertently had shaken loose one of the pieces of his memory: ". . . has everyone believing it really is a matter of life and death...
...Kanter,' she's huffing at me, like suddenly she's Molly Picon or someone, standing in the middle of the stage about to give the speech that made her famous the whole world around...
...Well, you appreciate that I tell you about some of the books I read, and the thoughts I have, I appreciate that you listen and because you know a lot more than you ever reveal to me, you don't ask...
...You want to write about me, you should go ahead and write about me, but tell them the details don't make any difference...
...There was a long pause...
...She won't with me...
...Not one piece of something that one of my children drew on or wrote on...
...But this woman was in a rage...
...I could not have turned away even if I had wanted to...
...He waved both his hands toward the window behind him where the late afternoon light was beginning to dim...
...Maybe what it is is that I feel death is behind me, not out in front of me...
...I unwrapped it like it was going to contain the secret of life, at least that...
...He knew I was a ready audience for him too, and probably because he had interrogated me deeply not only on my training in psychology but on my psychological beliefs, he would play out his word jokes on topics like senility, forgetfulness, oversights, slips of the tongue...
...I remember how my heart raced as I pulled it out and saw by the wrinkles and the age of it that it was old, that it came from there, from that time...
...You don't ask about a lot of things...
...So this Fanny—do you know that I can never remember her last name?—she was furious with me...
...She was shaking...
...Yankel, however, in his perspicacity and wisdom, knew perfectly well that he rarely did the right thing for himself...
...In the beginning, when these sorts of episodes came on, I was stunned by the transformation in his appearance...
...Then, when the moment had passed, and his face relaxed—he didn't look like himself when these times came— he would glance at me, aware that I had been staring at him...
...Who knows, maybe I loaned my suit to a friend who made the note...
...She speaks it...
...For but the slightest part of a second he looked as though a tracing of the past had broken through the barriers and the only way to be rid of it was to let it find its way back into the mysterious interior where the past is safeguarded...
...I worried about Yankel, but like everyone else who knew and respected him, and saw what a kind and knowledgeable person he was, I never voiced my doubt about whether he was doing the right thing for himself...
...Better than fine...
...But you know that I wish you had a good doctor to recommend to me?' " 'Doctors aren't interested in helping poor people, so I'll never know a good one.' "You're right again, Fanny...
...Then that look came over his face, the lips dropping, the brows furrowing, his hand reaching unconsciously up to his nose, and when he once again was staring at me, although I couldn't see his face that well, I knew that we were both thinking the same thing...
...You know what she says...
...When they became a regular part of our conversations, I managed to be looking down or rubbing my eyes when his own eyes turned again toward me...
...Kanter, I would have a good doctor if I had money but how can I be expected to have money when people like you pay me so little to clean their apartments?' " 'Fanny, Fanny, great love of my life,' Itoldher, 'raise your price...
...You must speak to him now...
...She takes one look at me and says, 'No, no, no...
...I could tell you, 'Don't push so hard, psychologist, because if you push in that way you'll never hear another word from these lips.' But you don't ask...
...Not a word...
...You're right, you know, Fanny...
...Or things lying around the house that I could part with that she could use, like old dresses...
...I can't work every day because I'm always sick...
...You feel sad about your own death, not in a self-pitying way, I mean...
...A few people know about life...
...I got a better one...
...I can't disagree with you...
...Fanny Boehm would probably know...
...A little too young for my taste, a little too much long hair for my taste, a little too much over-respect, probably more for my accent than my age, but a doctor...
...Listen, between you and me, I have wash and wear shirts, right...
...She drinks maybe, doesn't work, doesn't have money, or she does get money from somewhere...
...First, you see, she had aroused this self-destructive quality I know I have, and that my brother Morris has, and my nephew Menachim has too...
...What did I hope for...
...My own little guru and savior...
...About a lot of things I mean," he continued, anticipating my fear that he felt I was only sticking around long enough to hear his one great survival story and planned then to leave him for good...
...I wanted it no matter what it was...
...You were lying, right...
...Fanny, you know Fanny who doesn't come in to clean more often than she does come in to clean...
...I was concerned about him when he was ill, naturally...
...I would have given any of them to her...
...And you know they expect it for themselves as well as for you...
...It's that bad an idea, is it...
...Or a good job...
...You can worry about your own death, or even be terrified of it, but in the end, if you'll excuse that expression, how can you feel your own death...
...Yankel s face practically exploded with humiliation and humor...
...Kanter, Mr...
...So what did I feel...
...About a lot of things...
...I watched him as intently as I could, letting him know that if this were the time, at last, he wanted to talk, really to talk, I wanted to hear...
...But still you're right to ask and wonder...
...So, with all the nonsense I stick in my mind, and with all the not nonsense I try to keep out of my mind, half the time I can't remember with those shirts is it time to wash them or to wear them...
...Sort of like psychiatric supervision...
...In fact I told him I doubted whether there was anything in the cup but hot water, milk and my two little saccharine tablets...
...I'm a big boy now, I could tell you I don't want to talk about those things...
...Either way, I felt in my bones she had a doctor...
...All right, enough on Fanny Boehm...
...I'll call Menachim...
...Today I don't play baseball...
...What I wanted to say was, 'hold on a minute, I have a wonderful book right here on logic...
...I'll make it short...
Vol. 7 • March 1982 • No. 3
