A Curable Romantic (49 page)

I shook my head. None of this was familiar to me.

“According to the legend,” Dr. Zamenhof said smirkingly, “this Herr Schleyer had been turning the idea of an international language over and over in his head — one of his parishioners had been unable to write a letter to his son in some faraway country, I believe — until finally, growing
tired of his procrastinations, who should appear to Herr Schleyer in the middle of the night, but God Himself, suggesting that it was high time the good Father got started on the work. Now, it’s not every day that God appears to you, even in a dream, and so Herr Schleyer began his work immediately.”

“And this was Volapük?”

Dr. Zamenhof nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. He wiped his lips on his napkin. “Herr Schleyer published his project in 1880, and in quick order, Volapük societies popped up across the globe. There were over a hundred thousand adherents in the beginning. Now, I’m not certain how many of these actually spoke Volapük, mind you, but obviously the time was ripe for an international language.”

“And in 1884 — ” Fräulein Bernfeld began to say.

“Yes, in 1884 …” Dr. Zamenhof nodded. “Go on, tell him.”

Fräulein Bernfeld, slightly annoyed at being even so gently ordered about, fixed me with a doleful look. “No, I was only going to say that in 1884, the first Volapük World Congress was held in Germany, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Dr. Zamenhof nodded. “And the second in 1887 and a third in 1889.”

“At the first two, all business was conducted in German.”

“But by the third, Volapük was the language of the day.”

“Policemen, concierges, even waiters in the coffee houses, addressed the congress attendees in Volapük.”

“I considered renouncing my own project and working in support of Herr Schleyer’s, but after reviewing his work, I saw that as a language, it was much too odd and baroque.”

“And in another few years — ”

“Ah, yes.” Dr. Zamenhof nodded sadly.

“ — it was dead.”

“The whole thing came crashing down — infighting between the president of the Volapük Academy, who advocated reforms, and Herr Schleyer, who, as God’s emissary, was disinclined to heed the concerns of mere mortals. Its failure brought terrible harm to our cause, I must say. Now, Herr Schleyer can’t be blamed for the fact that his work proved impractical,
and yet it’s thanks to his failure that the world cooled towards every other artificial language, and we’re paying a steep price for it now.”

Fräulein Bernfeld seemed pleased that I was taking such an interest in her Majstro. As she later told me, she was often saddened by the way so many samideanoj (“comrades,” or “people of the same ideas”) grew tongue-tied around him. A terrible irony, this: the acolytes of his international language found themselves often too nervous in the Majstro’s presence to say anything of value to him in it. Also, Dr. Zamenhof quite clearly had no talent for managing their adulation. His conspicuous humility, a strategy for subverting their adoration, I suppose — he hated the sobriquet Majstro, for instance, but could never bring himself to correct the people who used it — only increased the ardor of his disciples.

“Anyway, in 1887,” he told us, “I was ready to publish a pamphlet of my own. On that day, I stood before my own Rubicon. Once my brochure appeared, I knew I would never be able to return to the life I’d previously known. I knew what fate awaits a doctor who, relying upon the public for his livelihood, occupies himself with fantastical schemes. I was risking my future happiness and that of my family, and yet what else could I do?” He gave out a little shrug. “I crossed my Rubicon.”

He pulled on his cigarette and sighed, exhaling a melancholic cloud of smoke.

“As for Esperanto, I make no grand claims for it, except that it’s easy to learn, and my hope is that it will ease the way for mankind to reunite into a single family.” His voice broke, and tears moistened his eyes. “Until then …” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, the things men do to one another …”

“Oh, Ludovik.” Fräulein Bernfeld reached across the arms of their chairs and took his hand. As she held it to her cheek, I feared that I’d misread the nature of their friendship. Perhaps, in my attraction to Fräulein Bernfeld, I’d too naïvely assumed that she and the good doctor were no more than passionate friends committed to the same cause. At this tender moment — gone were the polite Fraŭlino Loës, the formal mia Majstros — they were suddenly Ludovik and Loë, and I wondered: was she, and not poverty, the reason Dr. Zamenhof had traveled to Vienna sans famille?

“
AĤ, MIAJ KARULOJ
,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “it’s late.”

With a raised knuckle, he dabbed the tears that had fallen from Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s eyes.

“I’ll walk you to your hotel,” I announced, a bit too brusquely, I’m afraid. Neither Dr. Zamenhof nor Fräulein Bernfeld had recovered from their weeping, and I must have sounded like a policeman ordering the survivors of some tragedy home before they’d come to grips with whatever terrible thing had befallen them. Dr. Zamenhof folded Fräulein Bernfeld’s hands together and kissed them gently. With an equal tenderness, he kissed her forehead. “Baldaŭ, baldaŭ,” he said, comforting her, and I had to wonder: Did he mean “soon”
(bald
in German) as in
Soon, soon, we shall be alone, without this prying lummox Sammelsohn to indulge our carnal passion for each other?
Or did he rather mean:
Soon, soon men will be able to speak to one another across cultures, and no one will savagely beat his brother to a pulp?

I felt like a cuckold, the sharpened points of my jealousy sprouting like horns from the corners of my skull, and I hoped that, if Dr. Zamenhof and Fräulein Bernfeld weren’t indeed lovers, they might misinterpret my hectoring not as jealous raillery, but as a new convert’s enthusiastic desire to spend more time alone with his Majstro.

Keeping hold of Fräulein Bernfeld’s hand, Dr. Zamenhof turned to me. Here was the same penetrating gaze I’d seen glancing off Sigmund Freud’s brow, a gaze that bore in, seeing everything. Dr. Zamenhof’s look was leavened with a sweetness missing from Dr. Freud’s. Whereas Dr. Freud seemed to see a wild beast, trussed up in a suit and masquerading as a man, Dr. Zamenhof saw its opposite: an angel who, convinced he was a man, had forgotten the most essential thing about himself.

With Fräulein Bernfeld’s hand in his, he reached for mine. “Isn’t it only right that two such good friends of mine should become friends to each other?”

Fräulein Bernfeld, looking annoyed, dropped her head and lowered her eyes.

“Do we have a little something for Dr. Sammelsohn?” Dr. Zamenhof inquired of her meekly.

Nodding, she broke away from our trio, taking a half step towards her
bedroom, before thinking better of it. “Oh!” she exclaimed, tapping her forehead. “I’ve left it in the kitchen.”

Dr. Zamenhof smiled beneath the scrolls of his mustache, as though to sweeten any disagreeable reaction I might have towards Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s ditheriness, but of course I had none. The woman couldn’t have been more charming. Her confusion had caused a blush to once again dapple her throat, and it stained her skin from her high collar to her scalp.

“Forgive my detaining you, Dr. Sammelsohn,” she said, emerging from the kitchen, all business again, a slender green pamphlet in her hand.

I read the cover, printed in a motley of typefaces:

Dr. ESPERANTO’S
INTERNATIONAL
LANGUAGE
Introduction
AND
COMPLETE GRAMMAR
For Germans
Price 40 Pf.
WARSAW
1889

“Thank you, Fräulein,” I started to say or perhaps did say, before correcting myself and addressing her in Esperanto: “Dankon, Fraŭlino?” I turned to Dr. Zamenhof for confirmation that I’d pronounced these words correctly.

“Jes, jes, ‘Dankon, Fraŭlino,’ certe,” he said encouragingly.

“Dankon, Fraŭlino,” I addressed Fräulein Bernfeld directly with a bow.

“Ho!” she cried.

“Ho, ve!” Dr. Zamenhof reiterated.

“Tre bone, Doktoro Jakovo!”

“It rolls off the tongue quite musically,” I said, and the two friends exchanged knowing looks.

Dr. Zamenhof raised his eyebrows. “And to think you almost didn’t come with me tonight.”

“Yes, and to think!” I said.

I WALKED HIM
to the Hotel Hammerand, our hands thrust deep into the pockets of our coats. The bitterness of the night made conversation difficult, and neither of us seemed inclined to talk in any case. I was thinking of the Fräulein, daydreaming of her (though it’d been hours since the sun had set). I have no idea what Dr. Zamenhof was thinking; however, at one point, he sighed so deeply, I peered into his face and gave him a concerned look. Suddenly aware of himself, he presented a mandarin’s smile to me and shook his head.

“There’s one thing that’s still troubling me,” I said.

“Only one?” he said, placing his arms behind his back.

“It’s the question of the Tower of Babel.”

“Ah, yes, I hear that all the time.”

“Does the good doctor really intend to reverse a Heavenly decree?”

Dr. Zamenhof fell silent for a moment. “I believe you’ve forgotten your Bible, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

“How so?”

“Oh, it’s the same with everyone, I suppose. Everyone remembers chapter eleven of the book of Genesis, in which God punishes the builders of the Tower by confusing their language and scattering them across the face of the earth, correct?”

“Correct.”

“But who remembers chapter ten?”

I looked at him blankly. “Chapter ten?”

He nodded. “Yes, chapter ten, in which the sons of Noah divide into seventy nations, each dispersing to its own land with its own language, all described by the Torah in the most naturalistic of ways. The towermen’s sin was not in the speaking of a common language — oh, no, Dr. Sammelsohn! — but in their rebellion against Heaven. With the memory of the flood still fresh in their minds, they built their tower as a means of escaping the next deluge, without having to examine their
deeds or repent of their evil ways. Now, we Esperantists are not in rebellion against Heaven — Heaven forbid! — rather, we’re engaged in the very work of Heaven itself.”

“Which is?”

“Which is to bring Heaven to Earth and not the other way around. It’s precisely because I am, like you, a Jew from the ghetto that the idea of uniting mankind came into my head in the first place.”

I nodded, understanding him at once.

“No one can feel this unhappy separation as strongly as a Jew. And one day, when our people will have reacquired our ancient homeland, we will succeed in our historic mission, of which Moses and Jesus and Mohammed all dreamt.”

“And that is?”

“That is, uniting mankind in a Jerusalem that will once again be the center of universal brotherhood and love.”

“And for that we need a neutral language?”

“Or do you suppose we can achieve all that with Yiddish,” he barked out, laughing, “a jargon that doesn’t even possess a proper grammar?”

We’d arrived at number 8. The lights inside the Hammerand had long been doused. Through the front window, we could see the deskman dozing at his station. A single red-and-black tassel attached to a key dangled from its slot in a warren of pigeonholes behind him. This was, I presumed, Dr. Zamenhof’s key.

“Well,” he said, peering through the darkened glass.

“It’s been a pleasure, Doctor.”

“No, no, the pleasure has been all mine.”

I held up his little green book. “I shall look forward to reading your pamphlet.”

“It’s freezing, and as much as I would enjoy continuing our conversation inside by a warm fire, I have much correspondence yet to attend to tonight.”

“For the movement?”

“Precisely so.”

“Then I shan’t keep you, Doctor. Adiaŭ.”

“Ne, ĝis la revido, mia bona doktoro,” he said. “I feel certain that we shall meet again.”

“Then I shall look forward to that splendid hour.”

We each removed our right glove to shake hands and, in a spontaneous surge of affection, gave each other kisses, first on the right cheek, then on the left.

“Ĝis la revido, mia nova amiko.”

“Ĝis la, Majstro.”

“Adiaŭ.”

“Ĝis,” I repeated, before stammering “Auf Wiedersehen,” and then

(Though we’d said good-bye a dozen times in three different languages, it was only when I’d said it in Yiddish that I felt I’d bid him a proper farewell.)

CHAPTER 3

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned in my bed. How blind could I have been? Here, at last, was the great and noble cause for which I’d been longing ever since
and
had appeared to Dr. Freud and me in Fräulein Eckstein’s hospital room! Harmony among nations, peace throughout the world, a universal brotherhood obtained through the promotion of an international auxiliary language — what could be more high-minded or more noble than that?