What were we all, really, but a silly bunch of Jewish dreamers, clowns, and buffoons?
Herr Bernfeld extended his hand, his palm raised towards Herr Goldberg, and lightly gestured with his fingers. Herr Goldberg removed a dossier from his briefcase, which he placed inside Herr Bernfeld’s open hand. Imprisoning Loë in his gaze, Herr Bernfeld indicated the dossier while giving her the blackest of looks.
She dropped her eyes to the floor and refused to look at him. He had no choice: surveying the sanctuary like a great predatory bird scratching out a place to sit, with Herr Goldberg, as always, a step and a half behind him, Herr Bernfeld searched for a seat. He moved first towards the women’s section before ruling it out. He lifted his eyes towards the balconies, uncertain why the women were not seated there where they belonged. Backing away from the men, repelled, I assumed, by their too-Jewish faces and their bold, misshapen noses, he had no choice but to stand in the back with the French, which he did, shaking hands and exchanging greetings, before adopting for himself their posture of uncomfortable disdain.
By this time, Rabbi Himmelglocke was chanting the Seven Blessings. Loë’s veil had been raised, and she was offered the wine to sip. She drank tentatively, choking a little, but then she took one sip after another and seemed so little inclined to release the silver goblet that Rabbi Himmelglocke had to pry it from her hands. He peered into the bell-shaped vessel and saw that there was no longer sufficient wine for me. Scowling, he refilled the goblet and forced it brusquely into my hand.
My drinking was disturbed by his hand clapping. he exclaimed, and my feeling of disembodiment ended. I was again myself, and I recalled, from my previous times beneath the chupah, that I was now expected to break the glass that the good rabbi had wrapped in a silk handkerchief and was placing upon the floor at my feet. I raised my foot, but before I could lower it, Loë picked up her skirts and dashed towards the doors, tripping over the cloth and crushing the little goblet herself.
“Fraŭlino!” I cried as she hurried from the sanctuary.
“Go after her!” Dr. Zamenhof advised me.
“Go! Go!” Dr. Javal seconded blindly.
I did as they commanded. “Fraŭlino!” I shouted again, running to the exit.
“Congratulations, old man.”
As I passed their frosty group, I heard the Frenchmen pressing their salutations upon Herr Bernfeld, whom they seemed to have gotten to know, in a single half hour, better than I had during the many years I’d been courting his daughter.
CHAPTER 12
I found la novan sinjorinon Sammelsohn downstairs in the room set aside for the bride and groom to spend a private moment alone together, her enormous wedding dress crumpled in a heap about her. She sat with her head upon the arm of the divan, weeping inconsolably, or at least as far as my abilities to console her were concerned.
Indeed, my presence only seemed to add to her distress. “Go away! Please go away!” she cried.
I was at my wit’s end, when a rapping sounded at the door.
“Loë,” I said. “There’s someone at the door, my darling.” I addressed her trembling back. “Should I answer it?” I said. “I will, if my doing so won’t distress you any further. However, if you’d rather I didn’t, I won’t, of course.”
Before I could do anything, the door was pushed open from outside.
“Dr. Sammelsohn,” Herr Bernfeld greeted me with a coldness all the more icy given the circumstances: I was his son-in-law now, the husband of his only daughter, and the father, I supposed, of his potential heirs. He was carrying the dossier I’d seen Herr Goldberg hand him.
“Herr Bernfeld,” I said, returning the greeting in kind.
“If you’ll excuse us and wait outside for a moment, Doktor.”
“Outside?”
“Are you deaf, man?”
“Wait outside my own yichud?”
I turned from his unsmiling face to Loë’s trembling back. Her shoulders juddered in anguish, her wailing swelled at the sound of her father’s voice. Should I stand my ground as Loë’s husband or surrender my place as her lord and master to its former occupant? Everything — my relations with my father-in-law, my marriage to his daughter, our future happiness — depended upon how I behaved in this moment, I knew.
Either I make my stand now or spend the rest of my life groveling in Herr Bernfeld’s majestic shadow.
“I’ll be outside if you need me,” I said. Herr Bernfeld and I traded places. I was now outside the room, craning my neck to get a last glimpse of my new wife, when he slammed the door in my face. I lay my ear against the paneling but could hear nothing. The musicians Loë had hired were in the upstairs reception hall playing for our guests, guests who were, no doubt, at that moment, waiting to celebrate our arrival into that hall as man and wife. The music interfered with my eavesdropping. From the few sounds coming through the door, however, I could guess that harsh words were being exchanged. I heard intonations of recriminations, invocations of a dead wife, counterinvocations of a dead mother. Did I only imagine it or was a face slapped? And if so, was it his or, more improbably, hers?
After that, if that indeed is what I’d heard, everything went quiet and, a moment later, the door opened from within. Herr Bernfeld moved through its frame, closing it behind himself. Ashen-faced, he brushed past me without a word and quickly ascended the stairs to the small foyer above.
“Herr Bernfeld?” I said, going after him. Turning, he gazed down his long, slender nose at me, as though he were the millionaire he was and I a beggar who had dared to call him by his name. “The reception is that way,” I said, indicating that once he left the synagogue and entered the garden, he should follow the building round to the back, on the right. “There’s an entrance after a few stairs down.”
“I’m well aware of that,” he said, returning his hat to his head. With a click of his fingers, he summoned Herr Goldberg, who appeared, out of nowhere, carrying his master’s cloak. “Herr Goldberg,” Herr Bernfeld said, nodding. The two men exited without a glance backwards through the big double doors of the synagogue — the afternoon sun poured into the dark shul with such intensity I had to shield my eyes — and then like phantoms at daybreak, they were gone.
My instinct, now that I’d seen the trick performed, was to disappear myself, but I lacked the nerve. It was impossible to enter the reception hall without Loë on my arm; neither did I feel secure in approaching her inside the bridal chamber. There was nothing to do but wait for her to emerge, sitting outside her door in the chair the shomer had hastily abandoned when Herr Bernfeld barged past him.
I SAT DOWN and stood up and sat down again.
How much time passed in this way, I cannot say — my emotions were too roiled for me to keep track of the time — but the band seemed to have started its repertory over. The music filtered down through the ceiling above me. Certainly they were performing “Kiss Me Again” and “Because You’re You” for a second time.
My mind went to the dossier I’d seen Herr Goldberg handing to Herr Bernfeld in the synagogue. I shuddered to think what was in it. Knowing Herr Bernfeld, I’ve no doubt he’d hired a detective to look into my past. And what would he find there? Everything I’d been hiding from his daughter, all depicted in the worst possible light: that I’d been married twice, that I’d ruined my first wife and turned her against her family before coldly divorcing her, that the abandonment of my second wife drove her to suicide, that upon my arrival in Vienna, according to a certain Dr. Freud, I’d attempted to rape the woman I was courting, claiming in my defense that she was possessed by a demon. How appalling it all seemed minus one’s subjective justifications.
At one point, Dr. Zamenhof wandered down the stairs, in conversation with a Professor Couturat. Dr. Zamenhof looked at me queerly, alarmed to find me on the wrong side of the bridal chamber door, while Professor Couturat, knowing nothing of Jewish custom and having evinced no interest in my person, ignored me, or rather continued to ignore me, or rather failed to
see me at all, pursuing his conversation with Dr. Zamenhof instead, the persistent tone of which precluded Dr. Zamenhof from even addressing me.
Transporting little dishes of hors d’oeuvres and flutes of Champagne, they took shelter inside the synagogue’s tiny library, where they were soon joined by a third man, a Professor Leau. Despite his physical superiority — Professor Leau possessed the dashing good looks of a matinee idol — he seemed to defer to the stubbier Professor Couturat in all matters, at times even standing behind him like an Oriental wife.
From my chair outside the bridal chamber, I could see them through the doorway of the library as now one, and now the next, paced before it, each speaking passionately, it seemed, although I couldn’t hear a word they were saying; though I watched them from this small distance, my mind was on other things, naturally. I had only two thoughts, really. The first, concerning Loë, beat like a drum inside my brain: When will she call for me? When will she summon me? And what have I done now to alienate her affections? The second (namely: I wish I had a kite) announced itself whenever I thought of the children I happened to have glanced, during Herr Bernfeld’s departure, through the open doorway of the synagogue, playing in the square with their tails and their twine. If I possessed a thought concerning Dr. Zamenhof, it was probably something along these lines: How good it is to see the Majstro basking in the admiration he so richly deserves from even the haughtiest of our French intellectuals.
“HUSBAND,” LOË SAID.
The door of the bridal chamber opened, and naturally, I lost track of Dr. Zamenhof and the two professors still conversing in the library. I started to rise from my chair, but before I could, Loë crossed the threshold and fell at my knees. She laid her head across my lap.
“Why can he not understand how much I love you!”
“Oh, darling,” I said, caressing her hair.
“Why would he come all this way? Just to ruin this day for me, for us!”
“Oh, no, no, it’s not ruined, Loë, no.”
“He thinks just because I threw that bracelet away when I was nine, he knows everything there is to know about me!”
“Bracelet?”
“When I was nine.” She nodded tearfully.
“He told me it was a necklace.”
“You see!” She laughed for a moment and wiped away a tear. “That’s how much he knows!” Then she began to cry all over again. “And now everything is ruined!”
“It isn’t, believe me!” I said, lifting her head and kissing her brow. “The reception is still going on. You can hear it upstairs.”
“Oh, Kaĉjo, you’re so sweet and kind! Thank God I married you.”
“What did he say to you?”
She blew her nose. “It doesn’t matter what he said, although it was terrible, terrible. I called him a liar, and I told him I never wanted to see him again.”
“What was in that dossier?”
She shook her head. “Let’s not talk about that. Never. Let’s never talk about that. Rather kiss me instead.”
Her kisses were wet and salty from her tears and from some sort of moisture that was coming from her nose. I gave her my handkerchief, and she prettied herself. It took a while, but eventually I convinced her to come upstairs with me to join the others. However, by the time we made our way as a couple to the reception hall, the band were packing up their instruments and most of the guests had gone.
CHAPTER 13
Loë and I returned to Vienna as man and wife and established our residence in her apartments. Relations with her father appeared to have been irreparably damaged, and though we lived in the same building with him and saw him often — for meals and family gatherings and such — the chill between father and daughter never thawed. Loë exhibited towards him what I can only describe as a cordial hostility. They were correct with each other, polite and precise, but there was an unmistakable hatred in her attitude that was quite obviously breaking the old gentleman’s heart. I tried to befriend him, but he would have none of it. Though I attempted, in his presence, to bring the conversation round to subjects that might interest him, he continued to treat me with disdain, a circumstance that only incensed Loë further, so that I stopped speaking to him altogether out of fear of worsening the situation.
Despite everything, I was taken on by the firm of Bernfeld & Sons, Inc., so that I might at least appear to earn a salary commensurate with the needs of the class to which I now belonged. Neither the Bernfeld daughters nor the Bernfeld sons-in-law were granted positions of authority inside the family empire — a network of markets and economies overseen by the six Bernfeld brothers and their sons exclusively — and my workdays were an empty canvas. With little to do, I established a free clinic in our offices and saw to the ocular needs of our Viennese employees. My hours were my own, and I’m certain no one would have noticed had I run off to join Herr Franz’s Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater, an idea I spent far too many afternoons in contemplation of.
As the time for the Delegation Committee neared, everything changed, however, and my office was suddenly inundated with mail. Multi-colored brochures, pamphlets, grammars, dictionaries began arriving upon my desk at a furious rate, forwarded through Paris from all across the world.
Like the other members of the Delegation Committee, I received prospectuses for nearly two hundred artificial languages and also Professors Couturat and Leau’s compendious Histoire de la langue universelle.
THE DELEGATION COMMITTEE was the brainchild of these two Frenchmen whom I’d seen Dr. Zamenhof speaking with at my wedding. May I say: as far as French intellectuals went, they were la vraie chose. Inspired, as had been so many of their countrymen, by the Paris Exhibition of 1900, dazzled by the array of international congresses that had been held in its wake, Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau were convinced that the time for a universal language had at last arrived. Putting aside their own work — Professor Couturat was a philosopher of renown, Professor Leau a prominent mathematician — they formed la Délégation pour l’adoption d’une langue internationale, and they hoped, through their delegation, to influence the prestigious International Association of Academies into deciding, once and for all, which artificial language deserved to be adopted universally. Should the association, a federation of the most important scientific organizations, find itself unwilling to cooperate — and this proved to be the case: the association declared itself incompetent in the matter — the delegation, according to its own bylaws, was free to appoint its own committee to examine the question and, afterwards, to found a society to promote the chosen scheme.
Having secured the participation of a host of intellectual illuminati (they bandied about such names as Bergson and James with ease) — it was their plan to bestow upon Esperanto two gifts of incalculable worth: the renunciation of its many rivals and the ringing endorsement of a body of illustrious men.
Dr. Zamenhof expected little from their delegation. Further, he believed the enterprise was fraught with danger. Their committee possessed no political power, no power at all, really, besides the illustrious reputations of its participants. “And anyone who hasn’t been convinced by the facts or by the strength of our movement will not be convinced by even a thousand Ostwalds!” he told them at my wedding. “Worse: informed by your committee that there are many artificial languages, more or less of equal worth, people will say to themselves that although one prestigious committee has chosen one language today, that’s no guarantee that tomorrow another, more prestigious committee will not choose another!”
“Pish!” Professor Couturat answered him. “We’d have to have selected our committeemen very poorly for that to happen!”
“Indeed,” Professor Leau said, “we’d have to be perfect comedians to perpetuate such a buffoonery!”
HOW I CAME to sit on the Delegation Committee is a story in itself.
Though it was more than a year away, and though la Tria Universala Kongreso lay before it, talk of the Delegation Committee threatened to overwhel
m the Geneva congress, and the excitement was palpable. Everywhere one looked, one saw les professeurs Couturat et Leau — planning, scheming, conferring, dashing off to send a telegram to this or that distant luminary. Though both Henri Bergson and William James had declined to sit upon the committee, the professors’ enthusiasm for the work remained undiminished.
And one afternoon, when Dr. Zamenhof, Loë, Klara and I had taken a respite from the busying work of the congress, Professor Couturat emerged so unexpectedly from a grove of trees in the Parc de l’Ariana, I was reminded of the character of Rumpelŝtilskino in Fabeloj de la Fratoj Grimm, which I was then reading.
“One last thing!” he cried.
“Forgive us for detaining you,” Professor Leau said, following him out. “The ladies especially.”
“However, the matter is urgent,” Professor Couturat said, dropping his pince-nez into his pocket and bowing hastily.
“Professor Couturat and I have been conferring,” Professor Leau explained to all of us, while Professor Couturat bore in on Dr. Zamenhof, “and we’re of the opinion that Rector Boirac’s presence on the committee is an absolute necessity. A must! He’s your best advocate.”
“Unanimous votes from the committee will certainly gather around his name.”
“Oh, it would be laughable,” Professor Couturat said, and Professor Leau obliged him by laughing, “and useless, of course — ”
“Useless,” Professor Leau echoed.
“ — if the whole of the committee were formed of Esperantists. Nonetheless, we believe it’s essential that Esperanto have at least one strong supporter there.”
“En fin: Rector Boirac.”
“If he doesn’t agree …” Professor Couturat pulled an exaggerated frown.
“We don’t see what Esperantist we could put in his place.”
“Perhaps the marquis?” Dr. Zamenhof suggested, no doubt thinking of our staunchest anti-reformer.
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