A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “I don’t care,” I said, taking the note from her hand and ripping it in two.

  “Oh my!” she cried. “But we’re in high spirits today!”

  Her maid Käthe helped me off with my heavy cloak.

  “Hang them over the tub, Käthe,” Fraŭlino Bernfeld commanded, and when the girl had left the room, I took Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hand and kissed its furrowed knuckles before pressing my lips against the softer skin of her inner wrist. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply through her fluted lips. The little sizzling sound of her breath cut electrically through me.

  “Mi estas tiel feliĉa,” she said, looking quite handsome in the grey light of the foyer, her hair an extravagant mane, her chocolate-drop eyes peering into mine.

  “Sed ne tiel feliĉa kiel mi.”

  “We must go and tell our good friend.”

  “Dr. Zamenhof, you mean?”

  “The poor man.” Fraŭlino Bernfeld shook her head. “From his last letters, it seems he’s practically near despair. To know that his work has brought together two such happy lovers would cheer him, I think. It’s not right, Kaĉjo, that we should be the only happy ones, is it?”

  I followed her to the table and to the meal Käthe had prepared. “I suppose I can cancel Monday’s patients and Friday afternoon’s, and we can go for a few days.”

  “Marvelous!”

  I took a sip of the wine. “But shouldn’t we write him first?”

  “No,” she said, stirring her soup, “let’s let it be a surprise.”

  The idea struck me as a poor one, but who could refuse Fraŭlino Bernfeld anything? Certainly not I, and so we made our plans: we would take the train to Warsaw to surprise Dr. Zamenhof with a visit, during which time we would announce to him our new love and (according to my own private scheming) our engagement. I wasn’t clear exactly how I planned to propose to Fraŭlino Bernfeld; I only knew that I would not return to Vienna without having done so.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sky was a milky grey, and the afternoon couldn’t have been duller. At three o’clock, I sent the last of my patients home and locked the clinic doors. Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I were to meet at the Südbahnhof. Arriving late, I caught sight of her, arriving later still. Our trip would consist of no more than two days of travel with two days in Warsaw, and I was perplexed to see her strolling down the platform followed by a porter toting a small caravan of boxes and bags. I’d packed only one small suitcase for myself, and her mountain of luggage made me nervous. As far as I was concerned, the Russian Empire was a wild and lawless place. One never knew when a maniac with a revolver or an agent of the secret police might step out from behind a baluster. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s bags would not only draw attention to us, but they’d make a dash to freedom all but impossible.

  “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to assassinate you from behind a baluster?” she asked, when I’d confessed these fears to her.

  “My dearfraŭino, I can’t pretend to understand the reasonings of a madman.”

  “And what information could you possibly give to the tsarist police?”

  “None, and as a consequence, they’d never stop torturing me.”

  “Tip the porter, Kaĉjo, and stop worrying. These bags are going only one way.”

  I did as she bid me.

  The train ride was uneventful, and we arrived in Warsaw early the following day. Fraŭlino Bernfeld wrote out the Zamenhofs’ address, 9 Dzika Street, for the coachman on a white card with a small mechanical pencil she kept pinned to the lapel of her frock. The man grimaced, eying our luggage. With so many colorful bags and gifts piled onto his groaning droshky — I could only imagine him thinking — he’d be a horse-drawn advertisement for marauders! He rubbed his hand across his whiskery jowls, and when he removed it, in place of his frown was the grin of a plucky hero, minus a few teeth. Dangerous though it was, he would ferry the Fräulein to her destination, with me along for the ride. He gave me a hard and penetrating look. Who was I, anyway — her brother? her accountant? an annoying pest she wished to be rid of immediately? He would get her there, even if it meant leaving me in a roadside ditch.

  We climbed into his cab. Warsaw seemed lost in a kind of grimy melancholia. Even the late morning fog felt dirty on my skin. The seats in the droshky were stained, and our horse limped along, farting, indifferent to the oaty detritus soiling its hindquarters. As we journeyed on, the streets became narrower and even more crooked, and we were almost face-to-face with some of the taller people walking along beside us. I reached for the latch on the droshky’s door and secured it. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s face tightened into a look of uncomprehending concern.

  “How nervous are you really?” she asked.

  “A little less now,” I assured her.

  She brought the droshky’s blanket to her chin and sighed.

  As the alphabets on the shop signs began changing — from Russian and Polish, to Polish, to Polish and Yiddish — I gathered that we had entered the Jewish Quarter. A raw-boned woman with an expressionless face stood in one doorway, watching us pass. Another sold herbs and tea from inside a coal bin’s delivery door. A white-haired man sat on a stone curb. Another in a worker’s cap tugged on a cigarette. Porters dozed on their boxes, as they did in Szibotya, their hands inside the mouths of their shoes. Wafting in and out on the wind was the sound of an ill-played hurdy-gurdy.

  Finally, our coachman stopped before a large four-story building. “Dzika,” he cried, before whistling for a porter. Together, the two unloaded Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s things. I kept an eye on both men as they worked, certain neither could be trusted. The odors rising from the street — horse piss, manure, rotting fruit — added to my unease. I paid the cabman, tipping him excessively, as Fraŭlino Bernfeld had instructed me, although I suspected he was already taking advantage of our unfamiliarity with the currency. At the urging of the porter, we walked ahead of his wobbly cart, though I kept turning around to affirm that he was still here, fearful the moment I ceased doing so, he would sprint off and disappear with our things through some crack in a wall where we’d be helpless to follow him.

  “Ah, yes, here it is.” Fraŭlino Bernfeld pointed with her umbrella to a sign that hung beneath a pair of outsized spectacles. A dozen or so dirty faces crowded the consultancy window to get a look at the princess in her elegant blue cloak, standing beside her mountain of luggage. Drawn by the commotion, Dr. Zamenhof soon appeared at the door, dressed in his white medical smock. I saluted him with a little wave of recognition, which he didn’t seem to see. Irritation pinched his features as though he were considering an annoying puzzle that required an immediate solution: What is everyone gawking at? His eyebrows ascended, like hastily raised flags, as the pieces came together. Panic contorted his face. At last, he’d been caught out, his secret life exposed! (Again I told myself we’d done wrong by not notifying him of our plans.) His look of bafflement was followed by a grimace of resignation. There was nothing to do but present the most pleasant of faces to the world, and to the lovely people who had so kindly thought to surprise him. Still in his smock, he ran into the street, as though his only desire were to offer these two lost grandees directions for safe passage out of the neighborhood again.

  “Majstro!” Fraŭlino Bernfeld called, oblivious to Dr. Zamenhof’s embarrassment. He smiled tightly, his cheeks as red as polished apples, giving no indication to anyone who might be looking on that this gloriously eccentric title belonged to him.

  He directed the porter through the courtyard to the apartment upstairs.

  the porter said.

  I offered.

  Dr. Zamenhof cried.

  He didn’t greet us. Instead, casting a fearful look over his shoulder, he corralled us into the whirlwind of his activity, imploring us to off the street and through the squalid courtyard, into the precincts of his slightly less squalid home.

  “No one here knows of my work in the greater world,” he explained to us, his voice tight, as though there might be sp
ies hidden in the barrels inside the courtyard, “and it’s just as well. No one wants a utopian crank as a doctor.” He muttered this last in Esperanto, leaving the porter, who’d been following our conversation in Yiddish, gawking.

  “Klara!” he called to this wife. “Say hello to our guests! They’re special people. Introduce yourselves, everybody. Oh, and kisses all around!” He backed through the door, his arms raised, his hands opened, his fingers flicking, as though the kisses he metaphorically tossed out were hard candies. His figure darkened the doorway for an instant, and he was gone. I watched him through the window, a moment later, dashing across the courtyard below, avoiding the barrels and the goat, and disappearing at last through the inner door of his clinic.

  Flummoxed into speechlessness, Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I turned to greet Dr. Zamenhof’s wife. As small and as child-like as her husband, Klara Zamenhof stood in the kitchen wringing her hands. “I- I- I …” she stammered, her unhandsome face convulsing into the most womanly of tears. “I don’t know what to say. Dr. Zamenhof is … my husband has been … well, he’s simply not …” She collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, and Fraŭlino Bernfeld was immediately at her side. She nodded to me, indicating that I should see to the porter, who needn’t witness such an intimate scene.

  I said, slipping the man a ruble or two. “And no need to mention any of this to anyone …”

  he said.

  “I’M LOË BERNFELD,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said, “a friend and an admirer of your husband; and this is Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a friend and admirer of … well, I suppose of mine.” She said this last playfully. Avoiding my eye, Sinjorino Zamenhof nodded towards me in welcome.

  “Is there sugar?” Fraŭlino Bernfeld asked her gently.

  Sinjorino Zamenhof again nodded her head.

  “And cream?”

  Wordlessly, she pointed towards various of her cupboards.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn, please sit with us!” Fraŭlino Bernfeld said.

  “Jes, miafraŭino,” I said, and I sat, fearful that my least movement or my most casual word might send the sinjorino into another paroxysm of tears. Clutching the sugar, the milk, the cups, and the saucers all against her chest, Fraŭlino Bernfeld brought everything to the table and dispensed three cups of spicy Russian chai from the samovar.

  “Dr. Zamenhof isn’t well, you say?”

  “Oh, Fraŭlino Bernfeld!” Sinjorino Zamenhof said. “I can’t tell you, I simply can’t …” With that, her shrieking began anew, each hand worrying the other, as though trying to tear its twin to bits. As her wailing once again subsided, the realization seemed to descend upon each of us that we were, in fact, strangers to one another. An embarrassed silence overtook us, a silence filled only with the scrapes of cups on saucers and the sounds of needlessly cleared throats. I busied myself with my tea, hoping, in the meantime, that someone other than me might find something pertinent to say.

  “Oh God!” Sinjorino Zamenhof moaned, once again tearing at her hair. With a gentle authority, Fraŭlino Bernfeld took hold of her hands. As though speaking to a serious-minded child whose day had been ruined by the pranks of a naughty sibling, she urged Sinjorino Zamenhof to unburden herself and to tell her everything. Though considerably younger, Fraŭlino Bernfeld was the taller of the two, and as Sinjorino Zamenhof began to unleash her lamentation, she so resembled a child, I half-expected her to climb into Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s lap.

  “Oh, they’ve been bad enough,” she said, “these years in Warsaw, an absolute horror, you’ve no idea! No specialist ever practiced in this neighborhood before, and my husband treats factorymen, seamstresses, laborers for forty kopecks a visit! Forty kopecks a visit, seeing thirty or forty patients a day!”

  “That’s fairly excessive,” I told Fraŭlino Bernfeld.

  I myself saw no more than twelve.

  “And from those who can’t give forty, he takes twenty; and when twenty is impossible, why, he gives the medicine away! What else is he to do? Turn people away?” Her father, who had always supported Lutek’s work, she told us, was now giving them a monthly stipend. “A terrible humiliation!” And yet what were they to do? They couldn’t refuse it. “My husband’s nerves are wrecked, and his body won’t long endure the strain. He’s on his feet all day and up all night at his typewriter! Why, he’s even hallucinating,” she whispered, “and that’s not to mention the worry over his own father.” It seemed that Dr. Zamenhof’s father had lost a coveted position as a government censor, having been accused of letting a passage injurious to the tsar slip through in some publication or other. “But this is ridiculous!” Sinjorino Zamenhof wailed. “The article was nothing but a warning against intemperance!” Still, the old man had an enemy, a certain Zusmen, a drunkard himself and a baptized Jew. Zusmen had hated Markus Zamenhof forever without end, amen, and it was he who plotted the affair, and now it was all they could do to salvage the old man’s teaching post. “That alone cost us five thousand rubles in bribes,” the second half of her dowry, the first having long ago disappeared in printers’ costs. “No one wants a doctor who devotes his every spare moment to humanity! If my husband drank like Zusmen, may his name be blotted out, or played cards like the other specialists, why, he’d be booked with patients, and patients who can pay! But no, instead, every night — oh, every night! — he’s up till all hours, rattling away on his typewriter, corresponding with colleagues and collaborators over this or that linguistic question. It’s all maddening! And now there’s all this trouble because of Count Tolstoy!”

  “Count Leo Tolstoy?” I said.

  “Mm.” Sinjorino Zamenhof nodded.

  She considered her tea before pushing it away.

  ASKED BY THE journal Posrednik to give his opinion on Esperanto, Count Tolstoy had responded that learning Esperanto was an appropriately Christian activity, as it promoted understanding between peoples. Dr. Zamenhof quoted Tolstoy’s remarks in his own journal La Esperantisto, and the two men began a correspondence that led to the publication in Esperanto of Tolstoy’s famous letter, “On Reason and Belief,” a work considered subversive by the tsar. As a consequence, La Esperantisto was suppressed, and Dr. Zamenhof’s attempts to continue sending the gazette to subscribers in plain, brown envelopes brought the authorities down even more furiously upon his head. The magazine was banned, and Dr. Zamenhof lost all contact with the Russian Esperantistoj, nearly sixty percent of his following.

  “And so we’re doomed!” Sinjorino Zamenhof cried. “Doomed!”

  To keep her husband’s spirits up, she’d made him a little sign, which she’d posted on his typewriter, an ugly old black Blikensdorfer, that read NI LABORU KAJ ESPERU! (Let us work and hope!), but both of these were becoming harder every day.

  “Oh, how difficult, how truly difficult,” Fraŭlino Bernfeld said, “to do the good and to be so good.” She cradled Sinjorino Zamenhof’s head against the soft pillows of her bosom and kissed her forehead as tenderly as a mother might a child’s.

  “Ne, ne.” Sinjorino Zamenhof resisted the praise, it seemed, by habit. She began to pull away but was clearly exhausted, and Fraŭlino Bern-feld’s greater strength prevailed.

  fraŭlino Bernfeld said. Ssh, ssh, sleep a little here with me.

  In response to this gentle command, spoken not in the language of a new and braver world, but in the old and fearful one of our childhoods, Klara Zamenhof did exactly that: she slept. Looking over Sinjorino Zamenhof’s shoulder at me, fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled the corners of her mouth down in a comical expression of happy disbelief, as though we were the parents of a rambunctious child we thought we’d never get to sleep.

  As Sinjorino Zamenhof snored, her nose cushioned against fraŭlino Bernfeld’s breast, I took a moment to study her face. Unlike her husband’s, all ovals and rings, hers was composed principally of vertical lines. The nose was long and sloped, and the chin so pointed, in profile it resembled the tip of a slender moon.

  “Ho, Klara dormas, ŭu ne? Bone, bonege,” Dr. Zamenhof said, havin
g climbed up from his clinic via an interior staircase. He seated himself at the table, surveying the odd scene — the unexplained presence of fraŭlino Bernfeld and me, his wife slumbering on a strange woman’s breast. He picked up Klara’s teacup and, tilting it towards himself, swirled it, as though trying to reanimate its contents. Bringing it to his lips, he sniffed it before deciding against taking a sip. Beneath the weight of Dr. Zamenhof’s slumbering wife, fraŭlino Bernfeld pointed with her chin towards the samovar.

  “Tason da teo, Majstro?”

  “Ne, ne,” he said, refusing her offer of tea.

  He lifted his hands vertically, palms faceward, and rubbed his eyes, forcing his glasses onto the dome of his head where they remained even after he’d lowered his hands. “I was sleeping as well. Astonishing!” he said. “No, I fell asleep right on my feet, standing in my consultation room. I started to dream. I was in Veisiejai again, still so hopeful and …” He scowled at something neither fraŭlino Bernfeld nor I could see.

  “Majstro?” she said sweetly, and I heard the note of concern ringing in her voice.

  “Estas nenio, ne,” he assured us. It’s nothing. “It’s only sometimes I’m not certain who is here, you see, and who isn’t. Still, nothing to be concerned about.”

  “If you would prefer to lie down, Majstro …”

  “I sent them home, my patients. No, I did. ‘The shop is closed,’ I told them, ‘in honor of the princess who has traveled from so very far away …’” Bothered again, he scowled at something visible only to himself. “Stop it!” he cried, and quite suddenly he was shouting: “I’m not! I’m not, and no, I won’t!” To us, he calmly said, “There. You see: I’m not.” Enraged again, he cried, “How could you just burn everything, as though it were all — ”

  “Lutek?” Now he had woken his wife. “Please, just stop, stop it, please, Lutek!” she pleaded and, once again, she succumbed to tears.

  “I’m hungry,” he told her simply, and from his intonation, I couldn’t make out whether this was an explanation, a request, or a complaint. “But I’m also tired.” He looked at me and said, “The little creatures go right through the walls, don’t they?”