But then Felix noticed outside the window a large, suspended mirror seemingly designed so that traffic might see the around a corner, and tilted in such a way that he now became aware of the Professor’s face, larger than life, staring back through the window at the patient, and the doctor’s brown eyes suddenly turned almost blue in the convex reflection.
Felix continued to deliver himself of every disease theory and personal crisis he could think of, from heartburn to a recent thump of the prostate, as well as generalized fears of bankruptcy, invasion, and senility, until after moving from organ to organ and from brain to states of mind to soul, he could no longer think of anything to impress the Professor, and embarrassed by a lack of any true symptoms or secrets, he launched into a kind of nonsense, an Astingi camp Latin, running words and puns together — a test to determine if the Professor was really listening.
Kek man camov te jib bollimengreskkoenaes,
Man camov te jib weshenjugalogonaes.
(I do not wish to live like a baptized person.
I wish to live like a dog of the wood.)
His interlocutor spun around, acknowledging the sudden discontinuity in his patient’s story, but as if to remind him that he had specified no limitations to their conversation and had not the slightest interest in whether his patient talked shop or Babel, only gazed at him sharply over his reading glasses. This was followed by a mutually sincere pursuit of silences as each pulled a cigar from an inner pocket like a derringer.
The Professor seemed unembarrassed by the vacuum between them, and my father felt grateful that he did not leap forward to engage its awkwardness. Eventually, the Professor responded with a stream of impressions, including a morose allusion to the recent death of his child (a boy of two, from scarlet fever) and the consequent withdrawal of his wife. Felix suddenly realized with an aching heart that his examiner, through the exigencies of private practice, had been forced to lift his eye from the microscope and settle ruefully upon the notion that the tact of a passive observer might wring diagnostic truths superior to more intrusive methods. The Professor apparently was attempting, not without some courage, to put aside his own insoluble griefs and to frame his questions in a way that would not elicit standard answers — and the stranger and more oblique the answer, the calmer he seemed. Felix appreciated this, but knew this was not the time to register it. If Pür was human only in the face of an illness without apparent causes, the Professor seemed to be humbled only by illness which had no physical signposts — indeed, the room lacked that aura of fear present in almost every medical encounter, the sense that the doctor is in mortal terror of contracting the illness he has just diagnosed. Felix did not feel the excitement of having lied, as with Pür; instead, he felt like a schoolmaster’s favorite chagrined by his own tendency to exaggerate every response and be the brightest boy around. Nor did he feel the obligation to reward the Professor by being a happy patient. A large melancholia was over behind that black desk, too deep for any protocols to deflect. So while as yet he felt neither true trust nor respect, neither did he feel impelled to show off or amuse. His interlocutor’s detachment was not defensive as with Pür, and therefore not an offense. He recognized it as a Hebrew version of courtliness, but with a new and harder edge, always staying leewards of a predictable professional or social response. And so their lack of conversation continued, like those ritualistic incantatory chapters in Homer or Virgil which seem totally unnecessary to the story — pure male silence.
In advertising his reluctance to treat, the Professor had taken a page from the old diplomatists, who, knowing the governments they represented to be a sham, try to reach an accommodation based on decreasing confidence, a pact based upon the refusal to make any promises at all, and to buy time at all costs. Felix saw that in his abstracted way the Professor was reaching for that state of neutral grace between an animal and his trainer, when the unspoken bond is simply the understanding that there would be no concentration of willfulness without the other’s leave.
Now here was a man you didn’t have to talk to, and with whom you might one day really have a talk! Father resolved to trade learning for learning, acknowledging the Professor’s gesture with one from his own special repertoire of silences. He reflected for a time on which would be most suitable.
The most adaptable and engaging gesture in this world, more winning than sex or genius, is the puzzlement of perfect temperament, when a mistake or complication is greeted not with a snarl or shiver, but with the cocked, flipped-over ear of a pup, inquisitive and unsensational, asking only that you think through the hovering blow you are about to deliver. It is the one physical gesture from our stifflegged hounds worth learning, and while most of us for some reason almost always have an uncle who can wiggle his ears, Father, after hours in his shaving mirror, had mastered the discipline of cocking his left ear, then his right, which astounded his enemies and never failed to captivate women. It cut through formalities; expostulations were reformulated and put again more simply; even glances were more telling, as it elicited longer pauses but fewer hiatuses. It encouraged the other to articulate more accurately, and to sidestep small talk, or rather to make talk really small, as in italics, as if the great conversation of the ages could only be resumed when strong men asserted the feminine child within them. And so the Professor, though he was not prone to admit it, counted this session a great success when he saw his patient’s left ear rise and cock itself in his direction, asking for amplification. He responded with a sly half-wink, pulling shyly on his moustache, as they both blew smoke rings up into the æthers.
The two bearded men chatted on as if they were waiting in line at a customs house at a frontier, until with a glance at his watch the Professor concluded their appointment.
“Perhaps we will never find out what’s wrong with you, eh?” he said cheerfully, handing him a card for their next appointment, and they both admitted to themselves that they looked forward to the silences to come, as well as the session with Scharf a fortnight hence.
“Healing’s not pretty, Councilor,” the Professor concluded.
As he left the building, Felix suddenly felt cheated and abused, and had the overpowering urge to tell the quack off, which made him look forward as never before to his next appointment — until he realized after glancing at the card that it was a year away.
But as he sat stewing, he was aware of the muscles in his diaphragm relaxing, and for a brief moment felt that he was not fundamentally unlike everyone else in the world — a strange and disorienting experience for him.
A NEW CHALLENGE (Iulus)
This was the first trip the Professor had ever taken without a book. After hustling aboard an express at the glass-and-steel South Station and crossing the Hron by the Invaliden Bridge, he sat stupefied before the window, watching rearward as the endless gasflares, smokestacks, and open-pit furnaces of the industrial suburbs drifted past. Referred to as “The Tannery,” this blasted stretch never failed to make a dour impression, furnishing an unlimited portico of scenes for rich, recurrent nightmares. That people could take the local and actually get off and go to work in this hellish scene was beyond him.