A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  I sat trembling in the now-empty chamber. I knew the news of my perfidy, through the agency of General Sébert’s spy, had probably already reached my wife, and suddenly, I was no longer a grown man sitting in a splendid chamber in the Collège de France, but a boy in his father’s gazebo, General Sébert’s unknown spy substituting for my sister, whose back I watched, in memory, receding into the distance as she raced through our father’s orchards, shrilling his and my mother’s names into the air, ferrying back to them the report of my treachery, whose consequence, I knew, would be my eviction from their lives.

  How could it be any different with Loë? Forgiveness wasn’t exactly her métier.

  With a leaden foot, I made my way back to our hotel, doubting she would even be there when I arrived, and knowing that, if she were, she would most likely have already booked herself a separate room.

  BOOK THREE

  ON THE DEVIL’S ISLAND;

  or, My Life and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto

  CHAPTER 1

  I felt terrible, of course. Overestimating the quality of my character, as he was wont to do with all men, Dr. Zamenhof had invested me with his trust, and I had failed him. I’d fallen asleep at my post. At the precise moment my presence was most needed in the committee chambers, I was loose upon the streets, chasing down a young pick-pocket, and not because he’d picked my pocket (which he had done) but because I was under the impression he was the metempsychosical reappearance of my second wife.

  Did I truly believe that a spiteful Ita had lured me out of the committee chambers in order to destroy the happiness I had found without her? Had I but thought the matter through, had I banked the fires of my heart, had I cooled my head with the balm of sweet reason, not only might Gaston yet be alive — the image of myself, cowering, as his tormentor pummeled him to death fills me with shame to this very hour — but the world might also now possess, as its common heritage, an international auxiliary language. One mustn’t underestimate its loss. Without it, we live that much farther outside the precincts of Eden.

  However, whether I believed in this scenario of a vengeful, heart-broken dybbuk hardly mattered, as I was shortly to discover. Ita or no, we were surrounded by schemers and cheats.

  MUST I REHEARSE all the heartbreaking details?

  Let me say only this: there is no spectacle less edifying than a turf war fought between intellectuals and idealists. Though no blood was spilled, many fortunes were lost and men’s good names blackened and their years of visionary labor squandered. The Delegation Committee, as it turned out, was a fraud, a swindle, a Potemkin village designed to wrest the international language movement out of Dr. Zamenhof’s utopian hands. Professor Couturat and the Marquis de Beaufront had been in cahoots the entire time (and with Rector Boirac away in Dijon and myself otherwise engaged, there was no one to stand in their way).

  As the treachery of these men became clear, Dr. Zamenhof refused to have anything further to do them, but that only made it easier for Professor Couturat to push forward with his schemes, and he began to act as though the committee hadn’t chosen Esperanto at all, but rather a new language of its own devising called Ido after its pseudonymous author.

  Oh, yes, Esperanto might have been good enough for an Ostjude like me or Dr. Zamenhof, who, no matter how sophisticated we became, were still holding our breath, certain the Messiah was only one or two tram stops away, but the rest of the world needed something else: an international language enlightened by French culture, designed for the Western tongue, crafted to convey its most subtle and sublime philosophies. Ido, invented by hard-hearted scientists according to rock-hard scientific principle, would serve the needs of this real world without the burden of ungainly idealisms and other such fairy-lighted nonsense.

  The war between Esperanto and Ido had begun. Abandoning his philosophical work, Professor Couturat pitched himself into battle. Between his scathing attacks on his opponents and his condemnation of the fissiparous tendencies of his own Ido Academy, he became that most uncompromising of men: the infallible pope of a small schismatic church, issuing his denunciations, broadcasting his excommunications, publishing his accusations in a universal language understood by only a tiny minority of men. Dr. Zamenhof, hoping to remain above the fray, was unable to defend himself against Professor Couturat’s bloodying attacks.

  And by the time it was all over, both men were dead, and the international language movement lay in ruins. Esperanto’s great gains were sundered, and the worldwide momentum towards a universal language had splintered, exactly as Dr. Zamenhof had warned at my wedding, in a thousand schismatic directions.

  AND WHO WAS this mysterious Ido, this phantom linguist who’d graced the table with his reforms mere hours before the committee, unable to pledge itself wholeheartedly to Esperanto, might have floundered without them? Naturally, we were all shocked when the marquis unmasked himself as the culprit in the pages of L’Espérantiste. A closet reformer, what sort of defense could a man like that have presented before the Delegation Committee on Esperanto’s behalf?

  Still, upon further reflection, it made a kind of sense. Everything about the man was false. He had secrets hidden within his secrets. To begin with, he wasn’t even a marquis. Rather, the title had come to him late in his life and had been conferred upon him by no monarch grander than himself. Nor had he lost a family fortune. There’s little difference in appearance between a lost fortune and none at all, and the marquis exploited this fact. Even further: his name wasn’t Beaufront. Beaufront, as it turned out, was simply un beau front, a handsome façade. He’d been christened Louis Eugène Albert Chevreux, the bastard son of Louise Chevreux, his father unknown. Certainly he’d never mastered yogic breathing techniques under the tutelage of Swami Sri Giri, nor had he assisted Max Müller at Oxford on his translations of the Rig-Veda. Even the gazette in which he claimed to have read about Dr. Zamenhof’s books carried no such item; and his beloved Adjuvanto, it goes without saying, existed only as a smaller fiction within the grander fiction he’d created of himself.

  “Of course, the marquis was Ido!” I said, slapping my hand against the pages of L’Espérantiste. And now, he’d even confessed to it!

  There was only one problem: as with everything else about the marquis, this confession was a lie.

  SECRETS LIKE THESE cannot be kept forever, and when rumors of his authorship of the Ido pamphlet threatened to destroy the integrity of the Delegation Committee’s decision, Professor Couturat did what any man in his situation would do: he placed a letter, written ostensibly to de Beaufront, identifying the marquis as the author of the pamphlet, into an envelope addressed to Otto Jespersen in care of the University of Copenhagen and sent it off.

  (Whether he placed a corresponding letter to Professor Jespersen in an envelope addressed to the marquis, I do not know, but I wouldn’t be surprised: in his deceptions, Professor Couturat possessed the thoroughness of a stage magician.)

  The ploy worked. Puzzled to receive a letter from Professor Couturat that addressed him not as “Cher monsieur,” his customary salutation, but as “Mon cher ami,” Professor Jespersen was horrified by what he read next. If the marquis were Ido, and if Professor Couturat knew of this, what did it suggest about the integrity of the Delegation Committee’s decision to endorse Ido’s reforms?

  (The answer: something less damning than what the truth itself would suggest — that Professor Couturat was Ido; that he had conspired with or perhaps even blackmailed the marquis into capitulating to Ido’s reforms; that all those long and tedious days in Paris had been exactly what Dr. Zamenhof claimed they were: a comedy prepared in advance in which Professor Jespersen and the other experts, there for the sake of their prestige, were manipulated like puppets, an assertion Professor Jespersen had consistently denied.)

  (When news of all this reached me, I dashed from my apartments in the Karlsplatz, where I’d returned following my expulsion from the Bernfeld household, and I ran to the Prater, hoping to find Herr Franz in resid
ence at his Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater. I intended to propose to him that we collaborate on a puppet show chronicling my life in the international language movement — I would author the script; he would design the figures — if for no other reason than that I relished a scene in which the marionette version of Otto Jespersen, suited in his academic gowns, his arms tangled up in his strings, his wooden forehead blushing beneath a patina of red paint, declares to an audience of mocking children that he is not now nor has ever been a puppet in the hands of a wily Couturat! The theater, however, had disappeared without a trace; in its place stood a key-making concession run by an unfriendly looking fellow with a large mustache.)

  The letter caused Professor Jespersen enormous torment, and after many a sleepless night, he wrote to Professor Couturat, demanding the truth: Was the marquis Ido? When Professor Couturat confirmed this unhappy fact, Professor Jespersen insisted, in strongly worded letters to both men, that the fact be made immediately known. And when at last the marquis published his confession, Professor Jespersen was appeased and the matter closed, and Professor Couturat was free to devote his considerable intellectual and financial resources to the battle against Esperanto.

  THE MARQUIS BURNED his correspondence with Professor Couturat, and so we’ll never know what brought the two together as conspirators. Some have suggested that, unlike Dr. Zamenhof, the marquis couldn’t resist a bribe; others that Professor Couturat knew a certain problematical something about de Beaufront’s private life. Whatever the truth, it seems to me that Professor Couturat and the marquis were after the same thing: an Esperanto sans the inner idea. Distressed over Dr. Zamenhof’s insistence upon making la lingvon universalan one more branch of le mystification Juiv, the marquis seized upon the opportunity to switch to a less ethereal horse in midstream, trading in the Hindenburg of Esperanto for the swift lifeboat of Ido an hour before he felt certain the former would crash and burn. And what did he have to lose, after all, except a handful of superfluous supersigns and the accusative -n?

  LOË WAS WAITING for me at our hotel when I arrived from that final committee meeting, her bags stacked next to her chair in the atrium. She had a copy of Ido’s pamphlet rolled up in one hand and was slapping it against the palm of the other.

  “What in God’s name are you doing with that piece of filth?” I said, coming in from la rue St. Louis.

  “The general sent it to me,” she said.

  “Ah, General Sébert? Did he? Well, throw it out. I’ll have nothing to do with it. This Monsieur Ido, whoever he is, is no friend of ours, and he’s certainly no son of Dr. Esperanto’s.”

  “You sound indignant.”

  “I am. The Delegation Committee was a complete farce!”

  “Really?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, if that’s so …”

  “Yes?”

  “… then where were you, I’m wondering, when it was time for you as Boirac’s second to denounce these men for the blackguards you knew them to be?” She ripped her reading glasses from her face and glared at me through no lenses but her own astigmatic exasperation. “Not out chasing little boys in the streets, I hope.”

  “Sébert!” I cried. No doubt the general’s spy had apprised her of everything.

  “Don’t!” Loë repulsed my hands when I reached for her shoulders. I peeked at the hotel’s concierge stationed at his desk. He dropped his gaze and pretended not to be following our conversation. Why must we always argue in front of bellhops and doormen?

  “Unpack your bags and stay,” I said. “Let’s talk this over.”

  “But these aren’t my bags, Kaĉjo.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No, they’re yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “I had them packed for you. I’m sending you home. I’ll be staying on in Paris. Perhaps the general and I can straighten out this mess. Albert,” she called over my shoulder to the concierge, “ring for a taxi for Dr. Sammelsohn. It should be here in a minute,” she told me.

  “Loë,” I said again.

  “How could you just let them steal everything from us?” Once again she slapped the pamphlet against her hand. “This has Couturat’s finger-prints all over it. Any child could see that. It’s all so very Leibnizian!”

  I ARRIVED IN Vienna and took a cab to our apartment. Herr Bernfeld met me at the door.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of having your things boxed up and sent to your rooms in the Karlsplatz,” he said, screwing in his monocle. “There’s no telling when my daughter will return and no reason for you to stay on here, really, haunting the place like a ghost. Your continued employment at the firm is, naturally, out of the question.”

  “Naturally.”

  “However, I’ve spoken with Dr. Koller about the possibility of your returning to the clinic.”

  “And?”

  “I am happy to report I’ve managed a fifteen percent rise in your salary.”

  He was sorry to have heard about the debacle in Paris, he told me. However, had he been consulted, he would have warned us against exactly this sort of treachery.

  “Esperanto may be capable of reform, but not so men’s hearts.”

  He held my hand in parting, and despite everything, I was grateful for the warmth of his touch.

  CHAPTER 2

  And seven years later, when the Serbian madman Gavrilo Princip assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Europe set to cannibalizing itself, none of it, I regret to say, took me by surprise — neither the ferocity of the hatreds evinced on all sides nor the lethal shortsightedness of men who had earlier possessed loftier temperaments. Hadn’t I lived through the entire thing in miniature, my naïveté burnt to cinders by the Idists? After witnessing excellent men devouring one another in the service of a benevolent idea, the Great War seemed little more than a fully staged version of an opera I’d already seen as a chamber piece.

  All about me, men of good sense, men who should have known better — and by that, I mean writers, doctors, artists — felt their blood quickening at the thought of a good, purgative war. And while these men, in their last moments of freedom, set about proposing marriage to girls or purchasing new piping for their military costumes, I simply took mine out of its trunk — it stank of moth balls, perspiration, and the odium of military life — and spent nothing on its rehabilitation. As for girls, I had none to propose to.

  Still, the emperor needed all his sons, not merely the enthusiasts, and having been long in the reserves — the Thirty-fifth Yeomanry was my home — I was mustered into the medical corps as an officer and sent to the Eastern Front with a truckload of optical equipment. In no more than two hours, my assistants and I — these were a Dr. Gleissner and a Dr. Winternitz — had been captured by a Russian lieutenant and locked inside a tavern and promptly forgotten. “The war is over for us, lads,” I told them, happy to have spent nothing smartening up my uniform. We spent the night and the next day and the night after that requisitioning the tavern’s whiskey and sleeping across its long tables, while the battle of Przemysl raged on in the distance. We could hear the howitzers booming and the planes groaning overhead.

  At daybreak of the second day, I ordered Dr. Gleissner to open up the tavern door, which he did, although not without difficulty, bruising his shoulder in the process. The morning light poured in, momentarily blinding us. Birdsong filled the air. Venturing out, we discovered the corporal who had been our guard, sitting not far from the door with a bullet wound in his head. “Take his gun,” I gave the order to Dr. Winternitz, “and his eyeglasses, I suppose.” We stashed these inside our truck and roared away, traveling no more than three kilometers before running out of petrol. We took turns pushing the truck after that. We might have abandoned it, I suppose. However, it contained valuable medical supplies belonging to the emperor. We pushed deeper into the countryside and, as we traveled, I began to recognize the hills and the dales and the little rivers. We weren’t far from Szibotya, I knew. We sheltered, in fact, f
or three days in my father’s old gazebo. It was in ruins by then. My parents were long dead, Father having perished in the Szibotya pogroms of 1905, Mother succumbing a few days later, some say of a broken heart, others by less gentle means.

  I couldn’t bring myself to approach the house. Instead, I lay on my stomach in the grass, watching from a distance, as either Dr. Gleissner or Dr. Winternitz knocked upon the door to beg some food. The woman of the house brought out whatever she could. Periodically, as though she knew I was there, she’d raise a hand and cup it to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun and peering into the orchard, searching for me, or so it seemed, among the cherry trees.

  After three days, I could take no more of this, and I gave the order to push on. Though we’d discussed it not at all beforehand, and though we’d pushed the damned thing all the way from Galicia, we abandoned the optical truck at the city gates of Vienna. Let the emperor come and claim his property if he wants it! Affecting limps and contriving slings, so we might at least appear to have been wounded, Dr. Gleissner and Dr. Winternitz and I bid one another farewell before stealing back into our former lives.

  I unlocked the door of my rooms in the Karlsplatz and slept for what seemed like a thousand and one nights in the soft sheets of my bed. Hobbling in on crutches the next morning, my arm in a sling, I reported not to the army board, where I was obligated by law and by my own failing sense of patriotism to report, but to the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, where I quietly took up my old position. After a decent interval, I unlaced the sling and replaced my crutches with a sturdy cane. I was nearly forty. Who was going to think anything of it?

  EVEN AFTER THE armistice, terrible privations ensued. The war had cost its sponsors billions, and we were all paying for it now. The only man I knew who avoided absolute ruin was my former father-in-law, Herr Bernfeld (now Baron Bernfeld, if that title meant anything still). Bernfeld & Sons, Inc., had actually profited from the war. At their father’s urging, a Bernfeld resided in nearly every European capital, and the brothers had sold arms to every side, trafficking in a dozen different currencies, so that by war’s end, the corporation had lost not one sou nor one heller nor one pfennig nor one penny nor one ruble to the new inflation.