A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “The little creatures?”

  “Psft!” He made a noise similar to air coming out of a bicycle tire, his hand trembling in a motion representing quickness. “Or am I only imagining it?”

  He stood, then seeming to forget the purpose of his standing, said, “What was I after?”

  “Dr. Sammelsohn, go with him,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said quietly.

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Zamenhof said, scowling again at the oppressive presence in the room. He confided to me: “Klara would rather I didn’t see them, don’t you know?”

  “Didn’t see them?” I said.

  He leaned in and whispered to me: “But I can tell you’ve been swimming in the ethers, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “No need to confirm or deny it. I know.” Then: “Come and I’ll show you my consulting chambers. Was your trip to Grodna pleasant?”

  “To Warsaw, Majstro.”

  “To Warsaw, of course.” He smiled painfully.

  Before departing down the stairs, I turned back for a reassuring glance from fraŭlino Bernfeld, sitting so vibrant in blue, next to Sinjorino Zamenhof in her matronly grey.

  “Let’s open these packages Dr. Sammelsohn and I have brought you, shall we? I think we’ll find something we can use to make ourselves a fine dinner. And — look!” She opened the first of her many boxes. “Ludilojn por la infanoj!”

  There was a tin train, a teddy bear, and a little wind-up frog sitting on a big bass drum.

  DR. ZAMENHOF’S CONSULTANCY was on the ground floor. The room contained two overstuffed armchairs and a sofa. He threw himself onto the latter, though not without effusive apologies. Four outdated eye charts lined the walls; a stained basin stood near the window. Framed portraits of his parents glowered down at us from above his writing desk, next to a drawing of Oedipus embracing Antigone much in the same way fraŭlino Bernfeld had been holding Sinjorino Zamenhof in the kitchen. When I turned from the drawing to remark on this similarity, I discovered that Dr. Zamenhof, like his wife, had fallen fast asleep. How odd! I thought. No one seemed capable of staying awake in this house — though I admit the poor man was clearly exhausted. So tiny, he fit, head to toe, on the sofa, he slept on his back with his mouth open, his hands forming a bridge across his belly. His snoring was considerably less masculine than his wife’s. As always, he reminded me of a child, now playing at some game in his father’s clothes with a Purim spieler’s beard glued to his face.

  I made a note to myself to forward a few eye charts on to him — these yellowing ones were a disgrace — as well as some medicines our clinic kept but no longer used, though I doubted much of it would find its way across the Russian border.

  The late winter sun had almost disappeared, and outside, the snow was savaging the dirty court. The goat shivered, tied to her stake. I crept into an armchair as quietly as I could, fearful of waking Dr. Zamenhof. Suppressing a cough, I crossed my legs, uncrossed, and then recrossed them. Unidentifiable sounds came from various parts of the house. Water dripped from the water tank into the basin. For a moment, I could barely recall who I was or what I was doing in this strange room in this strange house in a foreign city in a distant land ruled not by our well-meaning emperor, but by a twisted Jew-haunted tsar. The world and everything in it seemed so tiny and fragile. Was it really impossible to escape the past? to refashion the world? Everyone seemed so filled with hatred. Zusmen hated Dr. Zamenhof’s father; Tolstoy loved Christ, but hated the tsar; the tsar hated Tolstoy because he loved Christ. The Russians hated the Germans, the Germans hated the French, the French hated Dreyfus, and everyone hated the Jews. My own father had driven me from my home. I imagined people the world over, sitting in their parlors, hating one another, while Dr. Zamenhof, exhausted from his efforts to deliver them from their self-destructive passions, slept. How many dictionaries, how many grammars, how many vocabulary lists would it take before the world was reconsecrated in all its pristine glory? Or, I shuddered to think, was my father right to turn his back on the world, seeing it for what it was: irredeemably violent, venal, base?

  Someone peeked into the room, but by the time I raised my eyes to glance at the door, whoever it was had gone.

  “Write it down!” Dr. Zamenhof suddenly cried, sitting up. He looked at me oddly, as though he couldn’t quite remember who I was.

  “Certainly. I shall,” I assured him.

  “Ah, thank you,” he said, stretching out again and falling instantly asleep.

  I don’t know how many more hours passed before Dr. Zamenhof next awoke, shouting “Ho ve!” but by then, the sky had darkened completely. He righted himself on the sofa. I lit the lamp, and he squinted against the light.

  “Feeling better?” I asked, returning to my chair.

  He sighed and lit a cigarette and shook out the match. He shrugged. “America is lost,” he said. “Ten years ago, the American Philosophical Society rejected Volapük and took up its cudgels on behalf of Esperanto, but nothing has come of it, and no other endorsements have followed. Everything has stalled. There’s no money to publish anything new. Everything will have to wait. Ah, Dr. Sammelsohn, we were so very close … One leap, one great leap forward. I imagined that was all that was necessary and yet …” He exhaled a melancholic cloud of cigarette smoke. “I’ve gone nearly mad with despair … Money, people, work. I’ve dragged my wife and my children — oh God!” His voice broke. “Look at Schleyer and Volapük. A million adherents and it all fell to pieces!”

  “Volapük is not Esperanto, Majstro.”

  “Still, still.” He shook his head. “Ten million promissory notes! What was I thinking?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “I’d wondered about the mathematics.”

  “People share books, don’t they?” He looked at me helplessly. “They’d study the language in small groups, I thought, wouldn’t they?”

  “Surely they do,” I said.

  He grew glum and small again. “Russia, the empire, America: gone. I don’t understand. Why was I allowed to come this far, but no further? And who can say that it all won’t simply disappear?”

  “It won’t.”

  “But surely that’s what they told Herr Schleyer.”

  “Herr Schleyer didn’t have a Loë Bernfeld backing him, for one thing.”

  Dr. Zamenhof smiled at the mention of fraŭlino Bernfeld’s name. “She loves you, you know,” he said, tamping out his cigarette. “No, I saw it that first night. In Vienna. I did. And her love, Dr. Sammelsohn, is a rare gift from Heaven.”

  “Is it?” I said, remembering only too well the last time Heaven thought to send me a woman. “Well, whether Heaven concurs in my choice or not, I seem to have purchased a ring.” I retrieved the jeweler’s box from the pocket of my jacket, where its presence had been irritating me all day. Dr. Zamenhof clicked open the box and admired the small diamond inside. “I’ve committed myself to proposing marriage to her before the two of us return to Vienna.”

  “Ho! Klara will be so pleased. No, it will vastly lift her spirits.”

  Dr. Zamenhof closed the box and handed it back to me. Our conversation stalled, and in the lull, he seemed to recall his problems all over again.

  “You’ve done so much,” I reassured him.

  “I’ve done nothing but dream.”

  He sighed again.

  “Trompeter lost interest,” he said.

  “The land surveyor?”

  “But the rich are like that, aren’t they? Still, he gave generously to the cause. But he insisted on reforms, you see. And I told him it’s not yet time. When we’re stronger, then we can reform and improve the language. However, not until then. Reforms would only signal to the world that the time to commit to an international language has not yet arrived, that a new and better language is just over the next rise, you see?”

  “Is there no hope then?”

  He shrugged. “Lately, I’ve been receiving letters from a Frenchman. A marquis.”

  “A nobleman?”
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  “Yes, and from the sound of it, quite wealthy. Well connected. Seems to know everyone.”

  “A beacon of light.”

  “From Paris, no less!”

  “The capital of the world!”

  “Precisely!”

  “And his name?”

  “De Beaufront.”

  “A marquis, you say?”

  “Yes, a marquis.”

  We heard someone descending the stairs. Dr. Zamenhof and I both assumed expectant looks and turned, receptively, towards the door. fraŭlino Bernfeld stopped at the threshold and braced her arms on either side of the doorframe. “Dinner, darlings!” she called out.

  “Oh? Yes?” Dr. Zamenhof’s eyebrows lifted, and his eyes sparkled like a baby’s beneath the glittering circles of his glasses.

  “Yes, Sinjorino Klara and I have managed to cook up quite a banquet between us!”

  DINNER WAS A feast of Roman proportions, the courses spread out on top of the Zamenhofs’ sideboard: sparkling pear wine, crescent kipferl with a cherry marmalade, wild garlic soup, roasted buckwheat salad, sweet wine from the Neusiedlersee, spicy goulash, chopped Kaiseshmarrn, Baltic Sea bass with sweet peppers, cabbage noodles, marinated kippers, and for dessert, a plum Knödel. In their finest clothes, the Zamenhof children, Adamo kaj Zofia, sat as quietly as mimes auditioning for a circus. Eleven and ten, they too were fluent in Esperanto and followed our conversation easily. Their father, that mad, shy, wonderful genius, stood at the head of the table, pouring goblets of pear wine for the adults and tart raspberry juice for his children, his good spirits returned to him by the company, the sleep, and the food. He toasted our love, fraŭlino Bernfeld’s and mine, comparing it — rather too extravagantly, I thought — to the great romances of literary history, to Tristan and Isolde’s, to King Solomon and the queen of Sheba’s, to Rabbi Akiba and the daughter of Ben Kalba Savuah’s, and finally to Klara’s and his own.

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld blushed. Sinjorino Zamenhof clapped her hands in delight. As Dr. Zamenhof carved the roasted goose, and young Adamo and little Zofia ferried slices around the table for everyone on the family’s finest china, we all chattered away in that strange language our host, as a remarkable boy, had invented. There was so much goodwill in the room, I felt as though my life were only now beginning, or else beginning anew. Everything seemed possible! Sitting at the Zamenhofs’ table, laughing, drinking, eating, chatting, I felt as I once did, long ago, before my father sent me to school, when I’d spend each day being handed from one sister’s lap to the next to my mother’s, the entire world, as far as I knew its boundaries, made up of womanly flesh.

  Before I knew exactly what I was doing, I had cleared my throat and tapped my water glass with my spoon. Standing, I nervously fingered the jeweler’s box in my coat pocket. “Estimataj sinjorinoj kaj sinjoroj!” I announced. Esteemed ladies and gentlemen.

  “Hear, hear!” Dr. Zamenhof happily threw his arm across the back of his chair. He grinned mischievously at his wife, who scowled playfully back. Somehow, I saw, he had found time to inform her of my intentions! Fraŭlino Bernfeld folded her small hands together and, with her elbows on the table, leaned her chin against her knotted fists. I looked at the children. Did they know as well? Young Adamo paid me no mind, but Zofia seemed on the point of swooning. Even a neighbor, Seidman, and his wife had crept into the apartment and were standing outside the dining room door, quite obviously waiting for my proposal.

  I began, stumbling over my words: “First, allow me — rather permit me — or rather allow me to permit — I mean to thank all the womenfolk of the household, including the neighbor, Frau Seidman — ”

  “You’re welcome, Dr. Sammelsohn!” Frau Seidman called in from the adjoining room, occasioning much laughter.

  “ — for preparing such a fine and elaborate feast. Kudos to Loë Bernfeld and to her maid Käthe, without whom et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, and so on.”

  From around the table: laughter, raised glasses, gentle applause. Dr. Zamenhof pounded his tiny fist against the table top, and the crystal shook.

  I coughed into my hand. “I’ve never been to Warsaw, as you know, and I simply wished to say …” Naturally, I hesitated for, at that very moment, it occurred to me that although I’d been wedded twice, I’d never personally asked for a woman’s hand. In the past, my father had simply found the girl and insisted I marry her. This brave new world of proposals and rings and public speeches was an unknown continent to me, and it was only after I’d stepped foot upon its shore that I realized how lost I was inside it. Proposing marriage to a woman in front of seven strangers, it very quickly occurred to me, was a mad undertaking. Should fraŭlino Bernfeld refuse me, the evening would be spoiled for everyone, myself not in the least.

  Nevertheless, I steeled myself to carry on, if only because it meant standing up to my father. How better to repudiate him and all he’d done to me than by marrying a woman as magnificent as fraŭlino Bernfeld and on my own authority to boot? Of course, doing so meant betraying all hope of a future rendezvous with Ita. In this lifetime, at least. Not that I hoped for such a thing. I didn’t. In fact, I dreaded it. Indeed, the prospect filled me with terror. Ita had a temper and a vindictive streak, and I trembled at the thought of one day having to explain to her that somehow, between her death and her rebirth, I’d — promises and pledges aside — married someone else.

  The happy, drunken, sated faces around the table all looked up at me expectantly, except for fraŭlino Bernfeld’s. She kept her eyes on the tablecloth, lightly fingering its pattern.

  I cleared my throat again. “It’s been quite cold since we arrived,” I said. “Yes, and … but … the welcome couldn’t have been warmer.”

  An impatient murmur substituted for the applause I’d anticipated.

  “And so” — I raised my glass and took a deep breath, my voice trembling — “I’d just like to say to fraŭlino Bernfeld …”

  The Zamenhofs and their neighbors quieted down. You could practically hear the snow falling outside. Everyone stole a look at fraŭlino Bernfeld before attending to me again.

  “Fraylin Bernfeld. Rather Fraylin Loë,” I said. “My darling …”

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld raised her eyes and met my gaze. Two crimson smudges reddened her cheeks. Her lips parted, the adhesive membrane of each separating from the other slowly; the tip of her tongue probed the opening, breeching the white border of her teeth, wetting her lips, as she prepared, it was clear, to answer a question about which, given the conspiratorial nature of the household, she must surely have been forewarned. I’d switched to Yiddish for the benefit of the Seidmans, and I stared as intently at Fraylin Bernfeld’s mouth as might a dentist, trying to discern if the tip of her tongue was poised to rise against her palette in order to pronounce the word ja or lowered against her bottom teeth for neyn.

  “Darling,” I heard myself saying, “thank you so very much for proposing this wonderful adventure and … and also for buying the train tickets.”

  I sat, and as I did, I hit the table with my knee, causing my water glass to tumble. I caught it before it fell, but a measure of the liquid flew out. From all sides, napkins were thrown towards me to stanch the spill. After a dulling moment, Sinjorino Zamenhof said, “Zofia,” and the little girl got up to help her mother bring in the Knödel.

  “I don’t think I could ingest another mouthful,” I said unhappily to no one in particular.

  FRAÜLINO BERNFELD CONTINUED doing her best to cheer up the household, hiring a seamstress to mend the children’s clothes and a cleaning woman to straighten up the rooms. I was ordered to stand in for Dr. Zamenhof in his consultancy, so that he and the fraŭlino might spend our two days in Warsaw with their heads pressed together, poring over the proofs of her Dutch-Esperanto dictionary and her translation of La Dua Libro.

  (Her clothes so reeked of Dr. Zamenhof’s constant cigarette smoke that, back home in Vienna, she simply threw them out. “I’ll never get the smell out of my hair,” she sa
id, “but it was worth it.”)

  Between the two of us, we contrived never to be alone during the remainder of our stay, and the opportunity to propose marriage continually failed to present itself. It was just as well, I supposed: just as a refusal at the dinner table would have ruined the rest of the evening, so a refusal at any time would have ruined the rest of our trip. Better to propose after we’d left, I told myself; and mindful of my promise not to return to Vienna without having done so, I decided to offer myself to fraŭlino Bernfeld in marriage at some point during the train ride home.

  We took leave of the Zamenhofs at dawn and traced our way in a hired droshky back to the station, where in the café, we breakfasted on strong coffee, brown bread, and pungent cheese. We ate quietly, I nervously leafing through the morning papers. Soon the sun penetrated the black drapery of sky, lighting all of Warsaw with its filmy light. When the train to Vienna juddered to life, we paid our bill and strolled across the platform to the track, no longer burdened with fraŭlino Bernfeld’s many packages. We sat in a compartment across from each other, our knees bumping. fraŭlino Bernfeld opened the window, and the air, though soot-stained, seemed fresher than the stale air of the compartment. Though I held the newspaper before my eyes, I read nothing in it, too busy rehearsing my opening gambit, too conscious of the little jeweler’s box in my pocket, cutting into my ribs. When we finally pulled out of the station, I folded my newspaper and glanced at fraŭlino Bernfeld, swaying softly to the rhythm of the train.

  “Anything interesting?” She nodded towards the newspaper. I shook my head. “Lutek needed a little bolstering, don’t you think?” she said a moment later.

  “Lutek?” I said.

  “He asked me to call him that. Majstro apparently embarrasses him.”

  “Yes, so I understand.”

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld gazed out the window and said, “Klara’s fortunate to love such a worthy man, to sacrifice so much for everything he believes in.”