A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “Although could you really be happy living as they do?”

  “What woman wouldn’t be?” she said simply.

  I nodded, although this was a vexing turn. I couldn’t tell by her tone whether, in her estimation, I belonged to this pantheon of worthy men for which one might sacrifice everything or whether I was barred from it completely. I glanced out the window, lost in thought. Was I the sort of man who believed in the exalted things a woman could happily sacrifice herself for? It was hard to say. What did I believe in? I’m certain, from any objective point of view, I appeared committed to no cause greater than my own happiness; and even there, I worked at it fitfully enough. Less a cause, it was more of a hobby, something to do with myself when I was bored. I couldn’t hide from myself the fact that in all likelihood I was exactly the sort of man who served as a deriding counterexample to Dr. Zamenhof: a proper medical man committed in his spare time to nothing more exalted than the playing of cards and the drinking of whiskey. (Although, in fact, neither of these pastimes appealed to me. I much preferred dropping in on Herr Franz’s puppet theater for the late matinee.)

  “I’m sorry you never met my mother,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said.

  I turned from the window, grateful for this change of subject. “As am I,” I said.

  “She was quite beautiful.”

  “I could only imagine.” I was too nervous to add like her daughter.

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld told me how fortunate her father had been to marry a woman whose every waking moment was committed to the welfare of her husband. According to his daughter, the illustrious Herr Bernfeld could never have achieved all he had without his wife’s support. Why, with it, he was able to stride the globe as a colossus, her love giving purpose and meaning to his extraordinary business skill. Without a family to cherish and raise, Herr Bernfeld’s wheelings and dealings would have had no more significance than a long and lucky day at the roulette table.

  I could only scowl. This last confused me greatly. Was fraŭlino Bernfeld offering herself to me, advertising the advantages of married life, or was she rather letting me know that such a marriage was beyond my means? Certainly I could never compete with these great striders of the globe, Dr. Zamenhof and Herr Bernfeld, the one linking all of humanity with the invisible telegraphic system of a universal language, the other overseeing an invisible empire that stretched from São Paulo to Johannesburg to Constantinople to Rome.

  “Ah, look! The Vienna Woods!” she said, pointing out the window. “We’re home at last!”

  I fingered the little box inside my pocket but seemed incapable of withdrawing it. Concealed from the world, we huddled as closely as was publicly decent in the fiacre on the ride to her apartment, the blankets pulled to our chin. Still, I was helpless to broach the subject. When I saw her to the door, she laid the palm of her gloved hand against my cheek in what I interpreted as a gesture of regretful farewell.

  I rode home, the interior of the cab redolent with her perfumes. I climbed the front steps of my building and limped down its familiar passageway. I’d been gone only a few days, but everything seemed smaller, stuffier, greyer. Inside, I dropped my bags to the floor and threw off my heavy coat. I set the coffee to boil. What else was I to do? Redon my coat, dash out into the freezing maw of winter, return to her apartments, and pound upon her door?

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I answered myself, but still I did nothing; and it was precisely at that moment that a banging sounded at my own door. Perhaps because I was expecting no other face or form than fraŭlino Bernfeld’s to greet me there, the identity of the stranger who crossed the threshold and threw herself upon my neck was an even greater puzzle to solve than it might have otherwise been.

  CHAPTER 6

  Uncle Moritz and Aunt Fania weren’t certain you were home. Were you away?”

  “Was I away?” I answered numbly.

  “In any case, I thought I’d wait in the coffee house across the road and see if you came back. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize you.” She picked up her bag again and faced me. “Are you going to stand there all day? Or are you going to step aside and let your sister in?”

  A grown woman now, Sore Dvore gripped the handle of her bag with both hands, shrugging against its weight. I stood on the other side of the door, my hand on the knob. She had, from any objective point of view, explained everything: she was in the city; our aunt and uncle had suggested she contact me, though they weren’t certain I was in town; she’d come anyway and waited; when I arrived, she’d crossed the street; and now we were standing across from each other at my door.

  However, though I could understand every word she said, I couldn’t make sense out of any of it.

  “Yankl?” she said. “Is there a reason you’re not letting me in?” Like everything else my sister said, this question baffled me completely.

  “A reason?” I said, unable to think of one. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then may I come in?” She laughed, and I stepped aside. “You act as though you’ve seen a ghost.” Sweeping by me, she lugged in her bag.

  “A ghost?” I said, shutting the door and following her into the parlor. “Why on earth would you say such a thing?”

  “Are we all so very ethereal to you?”

  She removed her hat and unbuttoned her winter coat. I took a step towards her.

  “Sore Dvore,” I said.

  “Sarah is sufficient.” Tying up her hair, with her hat pins in her mouth, she said, “I’ve dropped the Dvore completely.”

  “I never expected to see you again.”

  She held her things out to me, but my mind was too cloudy, and I couldn’t think to take them. Finally she laid them across the arm of the divan. “May I sit?”

  I motioned her to a chair. “Please.”

  For some reason, I neglected to sit myself.

  “Why don’t you sit as well, Yankl?”

  “Of course,” I said, doing so.

  We looked into each other’s faces. The youngest of my sisters, she’d been the closest to me in age, and I hadn’t seen her since she was fourteen. Now she was grown. Though her thick hair was, like our mother’s, the color of golden raisins, she and I resembled each other not a little.

  She crossed her arms. “That little beard of yours is charming.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed. “I’m a bit vain about it, I suppose.”

  “Oh!” She clapped her hands, remembering something. “Mama sent along some things.”

  “Ah! Very good!”

  She reached into her bag, but then thought better of it. “I’ll unpack it all later.”

  “How is she, anyway?”

  Sore Dvore looked at the twin knobs of her enskirted knees and placed her hands in the vale between them. “Not good, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Things have been hard since you left.”

  “Well, you can tell her when you return that I’m well, that you saw me, and … and that I’m well.”

  “That’s just it,” she said, raising her voice as I left the room to bring in our coffees. “I’m not going back.”

  “Father drove you out as well?” I said lightheartedly, sticking my head out of the kitchen, as though my expulsion from our family had been a merry joke and not the defining catastrophe of my life.

  “Not at all. Oh, not at all,” she said. “On the contrary, I’m on my way to Palestine.”

  “Ah, to Palestine?”

  “With Father’s blessings, yes. Thank you,” she said, reaching for the coffee. She took a provisional sip. “Oh, but that’s strong!”

  “He gives out blessings now as well as curses?” I asked. “Sugar?” I handed her the bowl. “Perhaps it will sweeten the bitterness.”

  I had intended not to mention our father, and I cursed myself for bringing him up. This silent curse penetrated the air between us, and I found it difficult to say anything afterwards. Ignoring my diffidence, Sore Dvore unpacked the bread and the cheeses and the briny olive
s and the salty fish Mother had sent, either as a gift for me or as traveling food for her, it was never made clear, and as she did, she told me all about her life: she’d had become an ardent Zionist. She had, in fact, attended the first Zionist conference in Basel.

  “Oh, Dr. Herzl’s speech was simply electrifying, Yankl! Do you know him, Dr. Herzl? Because he lives in Vienna, doesn’t he?”

  I spun my coffee cup on its saucer like a top, admitting that although I did not know the great Dr. Herzl, I had called upon him once, inquiring for him at the offices of the Neue Freie Presse, where he worked.

  “Yes? And? So?” Sore Dvore leaned forward excitedly.

  “Well.” I shrugged, embarrassed. “Perhaps I didn’t enunciate his name clearly,” I said, explaining that I had been taken to meet not Dr. Theodor Herzl, but Dr. Theodor Hertzka, also a writer at the paper, also the author of a utopian novel, although his, Freiland, unlike Dr. Herzl’s Altneuland, had nothing to do with Palestine or a Jewish state. As my interview with Dr. Hertzka wore on, I became confused: why on earth would the great Zionist leader go on and on about public land reforms and urge me to emigrate, not to Palestine, but to British East Africa, where advocates of his ideas had recently founded a model community?

  “But for that,” I told my sister sheepishly, “I might be a Zionist as well.”

  (These sorts of confusions continued to dog my life. For example: arriving in the Promised Land myself, years later, a Zionist in fact, if not in theory, I made a fool of myself by purchasing a large bouquet of roses and hiring a taxi to Bethlehem one bright and ringing morning so that I might lay them as a tribute to the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger beneath what I’d anticipated would be a plaque erected for him in Manger Square. How fortunate, I told myself on that bright day, how fortunate it is to live in one’s own country where one’s own squares may be named in honor of one’s own poets!)

  Sore Dvore brushed bread crumbs from her hands and laughed politely before going on to paint for me a picture of her last few years. She had read Dr. Herzl’s pamphlet in the very gazebo where I had done my reading and had become enflamed with the idea of immigrating to the Holy Land. She’d joined Szibotya’s Zionist group, Khibat Zion, and with its three other members began raising funds to send a pioneer to the altneu homeland. When the first congress was announced, however, the group elected to apply its funds to sending a delegate to Basel instead, with Sore Dvore the unanimous choice.

  “Oh, Father must have had a fit!” I said.

  “On the contrary,” she told me, “he approved wholeheartedly.”

  “Approved?”

  “What sort of life was there for me in Szibotya, Yankl? Backwards old Szibotya! Father not only made the first but, as it turned out, the largest contribution to our cause.”

  She leaned in, and her face grew serious. “Also,” she confessed, “I have a lover.”

  “A lover? Really?”

  “Are you shocked?”

  “Would you prefer me to be?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then I am.”

  “Sincerely?”

  “If that’s what you wish.”

  “No.”

  “Then no.”

  “Good.”

  “And the name of this mysterious suitor?”

  “Zelig Mintz.” They had met, she told me, at the Congress, and this Zelig Mintz had already settled in Rosh Pina. They were to meet up there, God willing, and be married shortly after her arrival.

  I smiled as though at an astonishing turn of events, although in truth, my heart was breaking. How dare that old tyrant dismiss on her part the very crimes for which he’d prosecuted me so severely! Had I been caught reading Dr. Herzl’s pamphlet (or even the newspaper for which he wrote!) there wouldn’t have been wives enough in Galicia with which to punish me! Now this same despot who had driven me from his garden was financing my sister’s move — in the company of unbelievers! freethinkers! Zionists! — to Palestine? It made no sense. It was one thing for me to have changed. After all, I’d been caught and captured, tried and convicted, punished and exiled, sent out of the Pale on my own, and at so very young an age, but what, I wondered, had happened to my father? With a sudden rush of memory, I recalled that it had been Sore Dvore who had found me that morning, happily smoking and reading in our Father’s gazebo, Sore Dvore who had reported my black crimes to our Mother.

  “So there I was, Yankl,” she was saying, “a girl alone in Basel.”

  “Yankl,” I said with a sneer. I discovered I couldn’t help regarding her now with a certain bitterness.

  “But why are you laughing?”

  “Oh, it’s just no one here calls me that.”

  “No? And what do they call you?”

  “Kobi.”

  Sore Dvore folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. She squinted at me and pursed her lips. Her gaze seemed to weigh a thousand kilos and, beneath its derision, all my careful sartorial choices — my unkempt Bohemian hair, my dainty little goatee, my haute optique pince-nez — seemed like the crudest of masquerades.

  “Kobi?”

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded.

  “Oh, but that just isn’t you!” she cried.

  Of course it wasn’t me. Or at least not to Sore Dvore. Naturally, to Sore Dvore, I would only be what I had always been: a wretched little malcontented Yankl, reading his forbidden books, and smoking his forbidden tobacco out among the cherry trees.

  “Fitting or not, it’s what I’m called.”

  “Kobi, then, it is,” she said, sounding slightly rebuked.

  “Although my fiancée occasionally calls me Kaĉjo.”

  “Oh, so you have a fiancée again?”

  I couldn’t help noting that a poisonous tone had crept into her voice as well. I stood and walked to the window, parted its curtains with two fingers, and looked out into the night, trying to regain my composure. Taking a breath, I turned to face her again, hoping to bestow upon her the full force of my charm.

  “Zionism, eh? Palestine! Marvelous! Simply marvelous. It’s only there that a Jew can live as a man. However, did you know I’m somewhat involved in a great social movement myself?” Leaning against the wall, I crossed one ankle over the other and laced my arms across my chest. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but Sore Dvore once again seemed to be suppressing her laughter, biting into a slice of bread with a thick piece of cheese and olives on top of it, in order to conceal her grin.

  “Oh?” she asked, chewing. “And what is that?”

  “Esperanto.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a universal language movement.”

  She brought her napkin, in an emergency, to her open mouth, and I saw that I had imagined nothing. Unable to suppress anything now, she struggled between swallowing her food and spitting it out in order not to choke, her shoulders shaking in helpless convulsions.

  “Oh, Yankl!”

  “Kobi!” I corrected her, although I wished I hadn’t. Whining, I never felt more like a Yankl in my life.

  “What’s the idea there? That everyone will speak — ”She laughed so hard, she nearly choked. “That everyone will speak the same language and then … ?”

  “Yes, and then, slowly, over time, of course, not all at once, mankind will be reunited into one family.”

  To calm herself, she’d taken a sip of coffee, but in reaction to this last, she spit the mouthful back into her cup. Particles of masticated cheese, olives, and bread floated in it like bits of fish food in an aquarium.

  “Oh God, Yankl — I mean Kobi!” she corrected herself quickly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry!” She shook her hands out in front of her, as though they were wet and she were trying to dry them. “I don’t mean to laugh.” But then something made her laugh even more furiously.

  Finally I could take no more of it. “And now, Sarah,” I pronounced the name as snidely as I could, “let me ask you a question. Just what language does Dr. Herzl imagine we Jews will
be speaking with one another when we all return to our newly regained homeland?”

  “What language?” She laughed once more, wiping a tear away with the heel of her hand. “Why, German, of course.”

  I scoffed. “Proof of the prophet’s excellence!”

  “Well, certainly not Hebrew! As Dr. Herzl says in The Jewish State: ‘Who among us can even ask for a train ticket in that strange tongue?’”

  (Unuvojan bileton al Jafo, mi petas, I thought to myself unhappily.)

  “Sore Dvore, let’s be honest now,” I said. “As noble as your Drs. Herzl and Nordau might be, as splendid as is their goal, do you really imagine that the attainment of universal peace and brotherhood through an international auxiliary language is any less realistic than the restoration of the Jewish homeland in ancient Palestine? I don’t mean to be cruel, but do you really suppose that a precious Viennese feuilletonist, a failed playwright, whose plays are completely tedious, by the way, your noble Dr. Herzl, for all his impressive demeanor, might in any way perform as an effective figure on the stage of world history? Only look at the facts: the Ottoman Empire would have to collapse. Our empire, God forbid, would have to collapse. The Kaiser of Germany would have to have a complete change of heart. Europe would be plunged into war. And yet somehow you think these kings and sultans will simply fall at the feet of a little Jewish journalist who spent two weeks holed up in a Paris hotel scribbling his now-famous pamphlet? No, even if you will it, it’s still a dream. And even were it to happen, the land isn’t arable! No one wants it! No one even lives on it now! Who’s going to till the soil? A bunch of soft-palmed yeshiva bukhers or neurotic salon Jews who don’t know that potatoes grow in the ground and not on vines?”

  She was nearly red-faced with anger herself. “And I suppose, Kobi, it’s more realistic to assume that millions of people, in learning a new language, will suddenly become the best of friends?”

  “Through free and open communication, yes, as Dr. Zamenhof imagines it, men of goodwill will come to see that there’s much more binding them than dividing them, and quite so.”