A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “Good?” she whispered hopefully, as I sampled my tea.

  “Very good, Fräulein.” I pursed my lips in a gentle, affirming moue, and as I watched her wending her way to her chair through the knees and feet of her other guests, the axis of my little world began to shift; as the ruby blush that dappled her throat deepened as she stood more formally before the little crowd, I knew I’d lost my heart to her.

  I BEGAN RETHINKING my priorities. It was absurd to hold back from life on Ita’s account. In truth, she was as good as dead to me. (What am I saying? She was dead to me! And to everyone else, for that matter!) And wasn’t it high time I put the unfortunate chapter behind me? One need only consider the practical implications of the pledge I’d made to realize how impossible it was to keep. After all, I had no guarantees Ita would even be reborn during my lifetime. Perhaps we’d had our one and only encounter for this go-round. Must I spend the rest of my life alone, not knowing whether she would reappear before my own demise? And if she did, how was I even to recognize her or she me? Though according to the paranormalists who credit such beliefs (the transmigration of souls, et cetera), we’ve all been reborn countless times, who among us has the least memory of his former lives or of the people he knew in them? No, the prospects seemed doubtful at best.

  Also, if I was scrupulous with myself, I had to admit that, although at times I was bereft without her (indeed, many were the nights I lay in bed, restaging our tender farewell in the theater of my mind), at other times, I could only feel I’d survived a narrow scrape. Ita had been a dybbuk, after all, the blackest of sinners in direct rebellion against the Heavenly Court, and a suicide to boot! It was with only a little distance between us that I was able to see her for what she was: a wicked demon who in no wise would make a suitable wife.

  If Dr. Freud’s original speculations were correct — and though he’d burned his chart, its inky lines remained vibrant in my memory — Ita and I had been chasing each other, with little to show for it, for millennia. What was one tender hour compared to a history of five thousand bitter years? No, I told myself, in all likelihood, it was Dr. Freud’s final view that was correct: a belief in reincarnation belonged not only to the childhood of mankind but to my own childhood, and as a consequence, I was particularly susceptible to it. And at times, it’s true, the fantastical story of my love affair with Ita seemed just that: a fantastical story. As the weeks and the months and even the years had passed, she seemed less and less real to me each time I thought of her, until I hardly thought of her at all; and though I’d pledged never to forget her, I did often forget her for long stretches of time.

  I crossed my arms and shifted in my seat.

  There was still the issue of the vow. I’d sworn an oath to Ita, and there was no denying that. The matter, however, wasn’t as simple as it might, at first blush, seem. Even if Dr. Freud weren’t correct, even if I hadn’t hallucinated Ita’s ascension (as he maintained) while lying drunk and bareheaded in the snow, even if I had sworn an oath, pledging (as I recalled) my eternal fidelity to her, one needn’t be a Talmudist to ask if such an oath, made outside the presence of two proper witnesses, is binding under Jewish law? The answer: it is not. Though, as we’ve seen, the dead may break the holy Law, like the living, they’re helpless to revise it; and though a promise is a promise, and an oath an oath, without two Sabbath-observant witnesses, neither constitutes a binding contract. In fine: even if I hadn’t hallucinated Ita, I owed her nothing; and if I had (I suppose this goes without saying) the same conclusion obtained.

  Viewed in this light, the affair seemed, at best, a regrettable error of youth; at worst, some terrible form of psychosis on my part. But either way, for the first time since that morning of April 1896, the astonishing events of which may or may not have occurred in the Sanatorium Loew, I felt free to move on with my life.

  AND NOT A moment too soon.

  Fräulein Bernfeld held the fingers of one hand locked, scroll-like, inside the fingers of the other beneath her handsome bosom, and had begun addressing her guests. “La nuna tasko donas al mi grandan plezuron,” she said.

  I’m reconstructing this dialogue, of course, after having learned Esperanto myself. At the time, I had no idea what she was saying, a circumstance she herself must have remarked upon, because having made her small speech welcoming her guests and introducing “nian Majstron, kiu bezonas neniun prezentaĵon,” she returned to her former chair, before thinking better of it and placing herself next to me. No words needed exchanging. Her look of compassion told me everything: she was here to translate Dr. Zamenhof’s speech so that the evening might not be a complete loss for me, the lone anaglot (Esperantically speaking) in the room.

  In order to do so as quietly as possible, she sat nearer to me than she might ordinarily have. Her throat was so near my face I had to continually suppress an impulse to kiss it. Again and again, I reminded myself — and in the strongest of terms — that Fräulein Bernfeld was a stranger to me, and one who had given me no indication that she felt a complementary attraction towards my person. Perhaps she felt nothing for me beyond a hostess’s pity.

  Dr. Zamenhof stood before the room now, nervous and ill at ease, looking exactly like what I knew him to be: a failed oculist.

  “Karaj samideanoj,” he said.

  “Dear comrades,” Fräulein Bernfeld breathed into my ear, and though she was translating a highly technical talk that was public and open to all, whispered, the words issuing from her mouth, coupled with the heat of her breath on my face, thrilled me like the most collusive of secrets.

  “Ĉiuj ideoj, kiuj estas ludontaj gravan rolon en la historio de la homaro havas ĉiam tiun saman egalan sorton kiam ili ekaperas …” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  “Every idea that plays a grave … no, rather,” the Fräulein corrected herself, emphasizing the revision by gently tapping my hand, “an important role in the history of mankind has in every era the same fate when they first appear.”

  “Ah,” I said, looking deeply into her eyes.

  “Clear?” she said.

  “… la samtempuloj renkontas ilin kun rimarkinde ostina malkon-fido …”

  “… the people living at the same time — samtempuloj: literally same-time-people: contemporaries — encounter them with a remarkably obstinate …” She thought for a moment. “Hm … malkonfido?”

  The word struck me as odd. “Faithlessness?” I suggested.

  “No. Literally un-confidence, mal-meaning ‘the opposite.’ The prefix cuts the necessary vocabulary in two, you see? It’s really quite clever.” No longer translating, Fräulein Bernfeld lowered her voice even further and told me that “Tolstoy himself learned the grammar in only two hours.”

  “Tolstoy?” I said.

  “Hm,” she said. “Well enough to read it” — she shrugged a delightful little shrug — “if not to speak it.”

  “Did he really?”

  “Yes, really,” she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  As the evening drew on, I came to realize that Dr. Zamenhof was not, as I’d presumed, merely one of the evening’s enthusiasts. He was the honored guest, placed at the very heart of this devoted circle, its members sitting almost literally at his feet. Nor was he merely first among equals here. On the contrary, he had invented Esperanto, created it on his own as a usable international language, so that men (“And women,” Fräulein Bernfeld reminded him sternly) might communicate across national borders, and even, in the same city or town, across cultural and ethnic divisions as well.

  “Let me understand this,” I said, as we took our seats in Fräulein Bern-feld’s parlor after the other guests had departed. “This isn’t just some interesting … intellectual game or rarefied philosophical quest?”

  “On the contrary,” Dr. Zamenhof exclaimed.

  I knew, as every schoolboy did, that philosophers like Leibniz and Descartes had attempted a universal language and had failed utterly. As with alchemy or the search for Ali Babi’s cave, I’d assumed the search for a
universal language was merely one of the chimeras that had bedazzled our benighted race during the quainter centuries.

  “Certainly,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “these men were more illustrious than I, but I would suggest to you they were after something altogether different.”

  “And what was that?”

  He exhaled a line of cigarette smoke. “They were seeking a langua philosophica, the lost language of Eden, a language so pure there would be no difference between a word and the thing it described, whereas my ambitions” — he ducked his head — “are not as grand as that.”

  “No?”

  “No, I merely wish to end the enmity and hatred that divide the peoples of the world.”

  He gave out a comical little shrug and, once again, I found myself nearly laughing in his face. Surely this was all an elaborate joke. The man couldn’t be serious! Inventing a language seemed impossible enough; promoting its uses to the four corners of the globe more impossible still; that it might affect some essential transformation in the hearts of mankind seemed a hope so far beyond the concept of possibility as to be inconceivable.

  However, one look at Dr. Zamenhof’s face told me he wasn’t joking. “Even as a small boy,” he said, “I knew this hatred wasn’t right.”

  He’d grown up in polyglottal Białystok where, he told us, the Russians, the Byelorussians, the Germans, the Poles, and the Jews misunderstood one another in a scramble of languages, often with fatal consequences, especially for the Jews.

  “Perhaps it was childish hubris to think so …”

  “No, no.” Fräulein Bernfeld shook her head quietly: she knew better than that.

  “… but by the age of fifteen, I’d formed a plan, you see.” He leaned in and tapped me on the knee, rearresting my attention. “I promised myself that when I was older — old enough for people to take me seriously — I would abolish this hatred.”

  I leaned back, smiling politely. Had I wandered into a tale from the Arabian Nights? Were these people mad? I wondered. For an instant, I felt supremely uncomfortable in their presence. Not knowing where to place my eyes, as one does in the presence of the mad, I looked at the silver coffeepot stationed on the table between us. In the convex mirror of its belly, our little party was replicated in miniature: our heads large bells at the top of skinny elongated necks. For all its distortion, the picture seemed accurate enough: surely I’d stumbled, Alice-like, into a Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  Once again, I eyed the door, thinking that now was the time to take my leave. Before I could prepare my excuses, however, the burning touch of Fräulein Bernfeld’s cool fingertips was once again upon my hand. “Coffee?” she said, pouring a cup for me and for Dr. Zamenhof and then for herself.

  “Ah, yes, very good. Thank you, Fräulein,” I said, arrested in my place.

  “IN THE BEGINNING,” Dr. Zamenhof continued with his story; he’d considered reviving one of the classical languages — Latin, Hebrew, or Greek — but these, he knew, would be too difficult for the poor. “Besides” — he sipped his coffee — “there were so many new things in the world, for which I’d have to invent new words anyway, that I told myself, why not go ahead and invent an entirely new language?” Also, it’d become clear to him that the only language suitable for these purposes had to be a neutral language.

  “A neutral language?” I said.

  “Belonging to no one and to everyone equally.” Initially he believed that the shortest words would be the easiest to memorize, and he contrived a series of arbitrary monosyllables: ab, ac, ad, ba, ca, da, e, eb, ec, be, ce, et cetera. “But even I, their own inventor, found their meanings impossible to learn.” In his next attempt, he selected roots from Latin, German, and Russian, and standardized them with simple regular endings. Thanks to the English he was then learning in gymnasium, he felt free to abandon the difficult declensions and conjugations that mar the faces of so many native tongues. “And then,” he exclaimed, “I had a completely unexpected breakthrough! Oh, it must have been 1878 or 1877. I was walking down the street, just a schoolboy in his uniform, when I chanced upon an ordinary signboard, hanging in front of an ordinary shop, something I’d passed a thousand times before, I’m certain. However, this time, immersed in my linguistic preoccupations, my mind perceived it as though it were lit by a great and shimmering light.”

  “And what did it say?” Fräulein Bernfeld asked, breathlessly.

  “Shveytsarskaya,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  Fräulein Bernfeld and I traded blank faces.

  “A porter’s lodge.” Dr. Zamenhof shrugged. “Nothing remarkable in that,” he agreed. “However, farther down the lane, there was another sign above another shop, this one reading Konditorskaya: a confectionery. Now, you see, the skaya in both, signifying place, was the same, and at that moment, I was like Saul on the road to Damascus. I realized that if I built my language upon a foundation of affixes and suffixes, why, I’d be able to bend a finite number of roots into the service of an infinite vocabulary. Now, the idea took hold of me, and I was on fire! My hands, my feet were trembling, and all those intimidating grammars and dictionaries I’d been pouring over, night after night, in my little room suddenly fell away.”

  Though full of faults and nothing like the Esperanto he’d spoken that evening in Fräulein Bernfeld’s parlor, the language was tried and tested and officially consecrated on December 5, 1878 (“although this was according to the old Russian calendar”), when, with a few friends and his brother Felix, young Ludovik made speeches and sang songs in it around a birthday cake his mother had prepared especially for the occasion.

  “That’s the Russian Empire for you,” Dr. Zamenhof said. “Meetings were forbidden, and a birthday party was the only subterfuge my dear mother could think of to conceal what we were about.”

  Remembering one of the songs he’d written for the day, at Fräulein Bernfeld’s insistence, Dr. Zamenhof threw back his head and sang a verse of it in his high, quavering voice, his cigarette burning down between his fingers:

  Malamikete de las nacjes,

  Kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está.

  La tot’ homoze en familje

  Konunigare so debá.

  “Hatred of the nations,” he translated for us. “Fall, fall, it’s long past time! United as one family will be all mankind!”

  AS ONE MIGHT imagine, the child met with nothing but scorn. A family friend even convinced his father that the boy’s single-minded dedication to this utopian folderol was a dangerous idée fixe which, if left fixe, would lead ultimately to madness.

  “And so Father locked everything away in a cupboard,” Dr. Zamenhof said, hazing his lungs with a deep draft of smoke. “All my dictionaries, my grammars, my translations, the verses I’d composed, promising me that if, when I’d finished my medical studies in Moscow, I were still interested in all this … rubbish … he would make it available to me again. Naturally, I obeyed him. After all, what son could go against his father’s wishes?”

  He looked at me, expecting some sort of masculine sympathy, I supposed, but of course, I could show him none.

  “Two years later, when I came home for the winter holiday, however, I announced to my father that although I would continue with my medical studies, as he wished, the aim of my life had not changed. I asked to be released from my promise and to have my papers returned.”

  His eyes sparkling, his lips smirking inside his bristling beard, Dr. Zamenhof paused at this chasm in his story and waited for us to prompt him to jump across it.

  “And what happened?” Fräulein Bernfeld finally said.

  “Well, my mother broke instantly into tears.”

  “Oh, no!” Fräulein Bernfeld cried, practically in tears herself.

  “My father had burned it all, you see.”

  “No!”

  “No, it didn’t matter, fraŭlino. No,” he comforted her, “silly girl, don’t be so silly. I was like Moses, trudging up the mountain for a second pair of tablets. I’d forgotten nothing. How could I? I
knew my language as well as I knew my Russian. Remorseful, Father released me from my promise, and I continued on exactly as before.”

  “Oh, Majstro,” Fraŭlino Loë murmured, her cheeks reddening.

  “Tush — no! — silly girl! Doing everything a second time merely helped me improve the language, and the only thing that stopped me after that, of course, was the appearance of Volapük.”

  “Volapük?” I said.

  “Hm,” Dr. Zamenhof nodded, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “It was all the rage for a time,” Fräulein Bernfeld informed me.

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of Johann Martin Schleyer,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “a Catholic priest living in Baden? No? Well, they call him the living Tower of Babel. Knows seventy languages, reportedly.”

  I shook my head. None of this was familiar to me.

  “According to the legend,” Dr. Zamenhof said smirkingly, “this Herr Schleyer had been turning the idea of an international language over and over in his head — one of his parishioners had been unable to write a letter to his son in some faraway country, I believe — until finally, growing tired of his procrastinations, who should appear to Herr Schleyer in the middle of the night, but God Himself, suggesting that it was high time the good Father got started on the work. Now, it’s not every day that God appears to you, even in a dream, and so Herr Schleyer began his work immediately.”

  “And this was Volapük?”

  Dr. Zamenhof nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. He wiped his lips on his napkin. “Herr Schleyer published his project in 1880, and in quick order, Volapük societies popped up across the globe. There were over a hundred thousand adherents in the beginning. Now, I’m not certain how many of these actually spoke Volapük, mind you, but obviously the time was ripe for an international language.”

  “And in 1884 — ” Fräulein Bernfeld began to say.

  “Yes, in 1884 …” Dr. Zamenhof nodded. “Go on, tell him.”

  Fräulein Bernfeld, slightly annoyed at being even so gently ordered about, fixed me with a doleful look. “No, I was only going to say that in 1884, the first Volapük World Congress was held in Germany, wasn’t it?”