A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Just as Dr. Freud played the cicerone in my love affair with Fräulein Eckstein, so Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, in Vienna at the time for an ocular refresher course, played it here. I had no idea who he was, nor any reason to have known him. The era of his greatest fame still lay far in the future. And although he was the second great man I had the privilege of knowing, he couldn’t have been less like Sigmund Freud had he resolved to be unlike him in every way. They had but one characteristic in common: the utter havoc each man brought to my life, and though I imagined my friendship with each would lead me out of the labyrinth of Ita’s attraction for me, both men only dropped me, panting and breathless, at her gate.

  WITH LITTLE TO do in the aftermath of my second expulsion from Dr. Freud’s life, I rededicated myself, as I’ve said, to my work, and as a consequence of the advances I made at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, I’d been asked by my superior, Dr. Koller, to present an ocular refresher course at the university on his behalf. The seminar had been an ordeal from top to bottom. I’d never stood at the head of a class before, and certainly not one filled with doctors, and my nervousness conspired with my sense of inadequacy to such a degree that I had to force myself each day into the lecture hall, where I hacked my way through the curriculum, my wits as dull as a rusted machete, and by the end of the week, I wanted nothing more than to sit in my darkened rooms and breathe in the musty vapors of my more private unhappinesses.

  Must I rehearse the litany of my woes? Ita was gone; Dr. Freud had rebanished me to a social Siberia; I was living without apparent remedy for the unnatural widowerhood I’d acquired through the most unworldly of means; and though I’d been married twice, I’d yet to taste the nectar of carnal love. Worse: I’d been driven, by my father, from our family, and though my uncle Moritz had sponsored my medical studies in Vienna, I seemed to have remembered nothing at all and felt a complete fraud standing before this colloquium of esteemed colleagues, most of whom, at week’s end, were exiting the surgical theater.

  As I waited for the elderly woman upon whom I’d performed the day’s final demonstration (a double iridectomy) to awaken from the chloral I’d administered — I’d begun to fear I’d murdered the poor unfortunate — Dr. Zamenhof descended the aisle and approached my lectern in order to thank me for what he said had been an enlightening week. “I had absolutely no idea, no idea of the advances Major Smith had made in the Punjab treating pterygium!” he told me. “Absolutely none at all!”

  As he offered me his hand, it was all I could do not to giggle. It’s difficult to credit my reaction, but there was something silly about the man. His pale eyes glittered merrily behind his tiny spectacles, and his beard, an elegant square, was parted fussily down the middle. (Once a fiery red, it seemed to have burnt down to a crisp grey ash along its edges.) Scrolled towards their ends, his mustaches lent him a hint of flamboyance without turning him into a dandy, and his eyebrows, flown perpetually at high mast, inflected his face with a perpetual air of wonderment. Were it not for the great hairless dome of his cranium, I might have thought he was a child masquerading as an adult, sent in to the surgical theater as practical joke, although, of course, I knew of no one who might play such a joke on me.

  His voice was high and quavering; his manners, fusty; his clothing, old-fashioned though meticulously cared for (a sure sign of poverty, I told myself). Nevertheless, something about him reached me in the depths of my Arctic loneliness. I found my mood lightening in his presence, and when he asked for directions to Papagenogasse, I surprised myself by offering to accompanying him there.

  “Splendid! Excellent!” he cried. “I don’t wish to rush you. Your patient has not yet recovered from the chloral. However, I’m afraid I’m late as it is for a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “Hm,” he said. “With a group of language enthusiasts.” And for some reason, he blushed.

  STROLLING ALONGSIDE DR. Ludovik Leyzer Zamenhof was a bit like walking beside a potbellied stove: there was something warming about his company. My ear had not yet dulled to the comical element in his voice, and each time he spoke, I found myself giggling. As he scurried through the maze of our city in his black bowler hat and his black frock coat, he reminded me of a character from a fairy tale, a mouse, perhaps, that had been transformed into a man, and no one seemed more delighted by this transformation than the little mouse himself. He seemed to be what Frederick Eckstein, in a lecture I’d recently attended on the Kama Sutra (hoping in my loneliness to reacquaint myself with his sister), had called a vidushaka, that rare fellow the mere sight of whom makes one want to laugh.

  These were difficult times for him, he said, and although he was recounting to me the story of his failures, he did so with such good humor that neither of us could help laughing. His original practice, somewhere out on the frozen Russian steppes, had failed. He was ashamed to admit it, but he’d been consistently outearned by a local faith healer called Kukliński. The few patients who did seek him out were often too poor to pay him, and it was he who, upon leaving their hovels, would press a ruble or two into their hands. And when a patient died, he renounced his fees completely. “How could I accept their ruble without a cause?” Eventually, he abandoned generalized medicine for ophthalmology, “a branch of our medical arts in which even the sickest of patients reliably fails to die,” but his new practice in Grodna collapsed when a second oculist moved into town. Now, at the urging of his father-in-law, he had returned to Warsaw. Worn out by competitors, he’d opened his shop in the poorest of neighborhoods, tending to the poorest of Warsaw’s Jews, half-blind vitamin-starved wretches with recourse to no other physician. As a consequence, his practice was booming, although few of his patients could pay him in cash. Instead, in exchange for his services, he accepted milk and butter and eggs and cheese.

  “And once even a live chicken. A rooster,” he told me glumly.

  I shot him a questioning look.

  “No eggs there, I’m afraid.”

  “And this language of which you’re an enthusiast?” I said, hoping to brighten the conversation.

  “Oh. Esperanto, you mean?”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Well, it’s not a native language, but rather a human invention, intended to be an international language. Its creator is speaking at the meeting tonight.”

  “Its creator?”

  He shrugged, as though the subject were of little importance to him. “No one knows much about him. A modest man who wishes only to give the world what he is able, he signed his original work with a pseudonym: Dr. Esperanto. In la lingvo internacia, you see, the word means ‘one who hopes,’ and though he never intended to call the language anything at all, the name stuck and appropriately so, in my opinion.”

  At that moment, a pall fell over the conversation. At least it did for me. I could think of no one but my father. A polyglot by political happenstance (as I believe I’ve described him), he looked upon the several languages available to him with horror. They were like whores in a brothel to him: there were too many to choose from, and though one differed from the others in the ingenuity of her form, they were, in fundamental use, the same: vessels of sin, corruption and waste. The labia of speech were no less a snare than the labia of sex for him, and wanting no stranger’s tongue in his mouth, he avoided all languages but those of our holy books.

  Though Dr. Esperanto’s aim — to join all humanity and not to separate from it — was diametrically opposed to my father’s desire, his methods appeared the same: to eschew all but two of the languages available to him.

  (Once again, I cannot keep a secret: this mysterious Dr. Esperanto, although I would not know it for another half hour, was none other than my companion for the evening, too modest to have boasted of his accomplishments to a new friend.)

  However, it didn’t matter whether Dr. Zamenhof was Dr. Esperanto or his least devoted acolyte: his similarity to my father proved too potent a brew, and I wanted nothing but to depart from his company immediately
.

  “Well, here we are then, I believe,” Dr. Zamenhof said, stopping before a large apartment house and rapping upon its door with the knobby end of his umbrella. “Perhaps you’ll join us for the evening?”

  “Ah, I think not,” I said, inventing the first excuse that came to mind. “I’m late as it is, I’m afraid, for a dinner appointment with a dear friend who’s recently been unwell.”

  “A young woman?” Dr. Zamenhof asked, his eyebrows rising an inch higher than their usual high station upon his forehead.

  “A young woman?” I said, abashed. I dropped my gaze and stared at my shoes. “No, I’m afraid not. A few years ago, you see, I had a rather harrowing experience, and not with one woman, mind you, but with — ”

  However, at that moment, the door opened, and Dr. Zamenhof, who’d only been half-listening to me out of politeness anyway, turned from me completely. “Ho, Fraŭlino Bernfeld!” he cried, and with the woman who appeared at the door, he began rattling off sentences whose meanings I couldn’t for the life of me decipher — although we were all Jews, I felt myself the Jew among them, excluded, by language and education, from their society — until at last Dr. Zamenhof spoke the only words I might at that moment have understood, my own name: “Doktoro Sammelsohn!”

  For my sake, he added in German, “May I present to you Fräulein Loë Bernfeld.”

  I NODDED IN greeting, willing my face to work, to move, to mechanically reproduce a smile, stunned, as it was, into paralysis by Fräulein Bernfeld’s beauty. I’d never seen a handsomer woman. Her eyes were as dark and as rich as two chocolate drops, and her hair, a magnificent blonde conch, was shot through with caramel highlights. Her mouth seemed to express half a dozen emotions at once: she bit her bottom lip insecurely; pursed her lips impatiently as I detained her guest at her door; sent a dimpled pout of reassurance towards him, growing cold upon her stoop.

  “Unfortunately,” I was suddenly aware of Dr. Zamenhof saying, “Dr. Sammelsohn has a prior engagement and won’t be able to join us this evening.”

  Loë Bernfeld gave me an uninterested look. “A pity,” she said, although she didn’t seem to mean it, or rather she meant it only in the most impersonal of ways: my absence from their meeting, though a pity for me — who in his right mind would give up a rare chance to hear Dr. Esperanto? — as well as for the cause — which could always use an additional friend — would not be a pity for her. On the contrary, she seemed content to continue living, as she had her entire life, without me.

  The same, in regards to her, I’m afraid, could no longer be said of me. Before I could announce a revision of my plans, before I was able to utter even one syllable of protest, Dr. Zamenhof was once again thanking me for an invaluable week. His patients, he said, if not his practice, would profit greatly from all I’d taught him. Our good-byes thus exchanged, he offered Fräulein Bernfeld his arm, and the two entered the building, chatting away fluently and with great affection in a language I couldn’t understand at all, until finally the door was shut between us.

  I STOOD UPON the Fräulein’s stoop, the cold night air cutting like a razor into the skin of my cheeks. I looked down Papagenogasse in both directions. Gas lamps flickered on all of its corners.

  “Fool!” I cursed myself, striking one hand against the other.

  All my life I’ve struggled at playing this role of myself, this absurd part Heaven has assigned me, never quite rising to its improvisatory demands, never responding with sufficient promptness to this or that cue, never quite certain whether the scene called for a hero or a clown, and it was no different that evening. Not knowing what else to do, I knocked upon Fräulein Bernfeld’s door, and in an instant, Dr. Zamenhof was once again before me.

  “Perhaps I will join you after all,” I said.

  His face transformed into a hieroglyph of wonder. “But your friend?”

  “There is no friend.”

  “No friend?”

  “I only said there was.”

  “But why on earth would you contrive such an excuse?”

  I exhaled and inhaled. What could I say to him? Could I really tell him all about my father and his odd linguistical notions and my consequential marriages to Hindele and Ita, and the effect it had all had on me when he’d mentioned Esperanto? Why not throw in the whole messy business about Dr. Freud and Fräulein Eckstein while I was at it? Instead, I opened and shut my mouth; I shook my head and raised my shoulders in a pathetic little shrug, a miscellany of gestures Dr. Freud would have deciphered quickly enough (“Ah, the father again?”) whereas all Dr. Zamenhof said was, “Oh, well. Come in, come in then, do.” He giggled. “You must be freezing out there!”

  And so saying, he offered me his hand.

  • • •

  NO SOONER HAD I entered Fräulein Bernfeld’s apartments than I regretted the bold impulse that bid me rap upon her door. Granted, she was an attractive woman, and I’m certain I’ve all but exhausted the subject of my weakness in this regard. Still, hadn’t I learned enough from my recent drubbing at the hands of Cupid’s thugs to know that what I was experiencing was nothing more than a fine aesthetic appreciation for the excellent way Fräulein Bernfeld’s skin draped itself so cunningly over her well-knit bones? Smitten, as I too habitually was, by the beauty of a woman’s face, I had allowed myself to forget the havoc such behaviors had previously caused me.

  More important, I reminded myself, I’d pledged myself to Ita. I’d bound myself to her by an oath. And besides — I couldn’t help noting with a certain peevishness — Fräulein Bernfeld was paying no attention to me at all.

  Indeed, no one was. As soon as we’d crossed the threshold of her rooms, the dozen or so men and women gathered there rose to greet Dr. Zamenhof. Offering him their hands, presenting their cheeks to his for kisses, they ignored me completely. Still ignorant of the fact that he was the (at least in this room) quite famous Dr. Esperanto, I was confounded by the reverence shown him, a man who, as far as I knew, was nothing but a struggling oculist. Though I’d accompanied him into the apartment and was introduced by him to all, none of the warmth with which he was greeted spilled over to me. Indeed, those who didn’t glance at me with hostility, as though my friendship with him somehow threatened theirs, greeted me indifferently before turning their love-struck gazes back to the little man who, no matter where he stood, seemed to be standing in the center of the room, his every need, despite his protestations, a matter of great urgency, this one taking his hat, that one dusting snow from his lapels, this one bringing him a chair, and all of them jabbering away, some fluently, others less so, in the euphonious gibberish he’d been conversing with Fräulein Bernfeld in at her door.

  Summoned by the whistle of a teakettle, Fräulein Bernfeld dashed into the kitchen, leaving the lamp on inside her bedroom, where she’d taken Dr. Zamenhof’s things. Two curtained doors separated it from the sitting room, and though she shut them, they’d neglected to catch, and I blushed to see the rough peasant’s afghan thrown across the bottom of her bed.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn,” Dr. Zamenhof said, watching me too closely, I feared, “sit anywhere.”

  “Yes, please do, everyone,” Fräulein Bernfeld called out, returning. “Make yourselves comfortable, do.”

  I took a chair nearest the back wall. In the excitement of Dr. Zamen-hof’s arrival, no one had taken my coat, and I let it hang, cape-like, from my shoulders. Miffed at having been overlooked, I cocked my hat onto the back of my head but was unable to bear keeping it on indoors and instead placed it on my knee, my hand upon its crown. With my other hand, I fiddled with my umbrella, which I also retained. I was on the point of leaving — in fact, I’d already stood and was edging towards the door — when Fräulein Bernfeld approached me with her teapot and a platter of mandelbrot.

  It was an awkward moment. Gripping her tray with both hands, horrified to see that no one had taken my things, she was nevertheless incapable of doing so, while I, holding on to them and seeing her distress, could do nothing to relieve
her of her tray. We were clearly at a social impasse, and the evening, which obviously meant so much to her, had come to a grinding halt. She gave me an imploring look, and as though I were rescuing a damsel from some dire mishap, I tossed my hat onto my head, draped my coat over one arm, hooked my umbrella over the other, and gallantly grabbed hold of her tray.

  “May I, Fräulein?”

  Relieved of her burdens, she quickly relieved me of mine before bundling them from the room. When she returned, I was able to give her back her tray, and she apologized, in a whisper, for having neglected me, while I, whispering as well, apologized for having allowed myself to have been neglected. The looks we traded, I was astonished to note this, were humming with the kind of mutual curiosity that charges the air between a man and a woman. The Fräulein seemed to be studying me as though seeing me for the first time, not as a blurry figure in the background of Dr. Zamenhof’s magnificent portrait (which is how I appear in all other chronicles of Esperanto, I’m afraid), but as a subject in a portrait of my own.

  When at last I reclaimed my chair and she filled my teacup, she steadied my hand, which I’d lifted towards her to make lighter her work, by placing her fingertips gently upon the top of it. The year was 1899, and one would have been hard-pressed to find a more erotically charged gesture in polite company. How long had it been since a woman had touched me? If one didn’t count my frustrated encounters with Fräulein Eckstein or, more precisely, with Fräulein Eckstein’s body, nor my clumsy attempts at lovemaking, as a boyish groom, with Hindele, my first wife, the answer was: forever. It’d been forever, which is to say: I’d never been touched by a woman, excluding my mother and sisters whose touch, it goes without saying, had none of the effect Fräulein Bernfeld’s was having upon me.