LEONARD KRIEGEL
579
I feel sanity threatened because Michael's nightmare is also mine. We
are, Michael and I, creations of what Susan Sontag calls "a more onerous
citizenship." It is not a citizenship one chooses. But endemic to the life one
claims from the skewered ambitions and twisted dreams of one's actual life
are the choices one makes. Citizens act, think, create.
In the struggle between sickness and health, the forces oflight and the
forces of darkness, Michael and I are simply soldiers in the ranks. Thomas
Mann pits Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim against one another in his
great novel,
The Magic Mountain.
Hans is indolent in his willingness to allow
disease to define his life; Joachim refuses to give in to what disease has made
of him. Mann, always the master ironist, destroys Joachim because he insists
on denying the defining power of disease. What infuriates me is not the vision
of Michael lying in his own filth on a bare mattress in a bare room. What in–
furiates me is that the genetics that defined him made him so dependent upon
others that his capacity to claim a self could be stolen by a bitter wife and
fearful sons.
When I was thirteen and returned to the neighborhood from two years
in an upstate hospital, I remember my mother walking into the apartment
one September afternoon , face tear-streaked and ashen. The butcher's wife
had just told her that my illness was God'sjudgement - on her. The butcher's
wife was known throughout the neighborhood as "not right in the head," a
knowledge that should have made what she said easily disrnissible. Sitting in
the sawdust-strewn butcher shop, childless, she would knit, our own Madame
de Farge, mumbling incantations in Yiddish to placate a God of vengeance
and to impose order on an evil-crazed universe. Her eyes would blank out
the world, and they would light up with the stare of the mad.
Mad or sane, the butcher's wife had touched my mother's center, as
Kafka touches our center. For she had voiced precisely what my mother
herself believed about disease in her own fear-ravaged heart. Illness was
judgement. Accident, illness, war, famine, disease - punishments visited upon
one by the master of the universe.
To call this "superstition" is useless. For the butcher's wife and my
mother simply believed what far more sophisticated and rational people be–
lieve even today about disease: Through illness, justice can be meted out.
The accidental victim turns out not to be a victim by accident.
It
is not the
meaning of illness that is beyond understanding. The meaning can be easily
understood. For to dwell in Kafka's House is to discover that judgement lives
beside one. And to be a "victim of disease" is to be tested, tried , made
''better,'' punished, reborn.
Anyone who has dealt with a long-term illness or accident soon recog–
nizes the extent to which his own view of it is judgemental. In Kafka's
House, a sense of mystery does not eliminate cause-and-effect. One loses
one's body to disease, but one also loses it to memory. And it becomes in-
