A Curable Romantic (51 page)

“I have to go now,” she said.

“I apologize,fraŭino, if I’ve — ”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. There’s another appointment I’ve just remembered.”

Without another word, she dashed into the street.

“Wait,fraŭino!” I cried.

“What? What is it?” She hopped back onto the curb to confront me. “What is it that you want from me, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

I didn’t quite know what to tell her.

“We’ll still be skating on Saturday, won’t we? That’s all.”

She huffed out a breath, sighing so deeply, her rib cage seemed to
collapse in upon itself. A vaporous cloud of condensation formed outside her mouth. The wind whipped her hair into her mouth, and she pulled it out with a mittened finger. Finally, she laughed and said, “I suppose we have to. Because you’re hopeless. No, you are! You can hardly conjugate your participles.”

MY FEAR WAS
that someone in our circle had told her of my past. Dr. Freud perhaps. I knew he couldn’t be relied upon for his discretion, and the history of my sentimental education
was
appalling: twice married, once divorced, once widowed, I remained a stranger to the ways of carnal love (despite the fact that my second wife, as a vengeful dybbuk, had kidnapped the body of the woman I was then courting and held it for ransom, demanding that I make love to her in exchange for the woman’s freedom). Naturally, I attempted to conceal this history from Fraŭlino Bernfeld, and had I been her only source of information, doing so would have been an easy task, since everything she knew about me I had told her in a language in which I could barely express myself with subtlety.

Dibuko? Transmigrado? Metempsikozo?

There were concepts to which, I felt certain, Esperanto never had to bend itself.

(Leafing through
La Plena Vortaro de Esperanto kun Suplemento
and
Le grand dictionnaire espéranto-français
many years later, however, I was surprised to find the second and third words, if not the first, listed in the very forms I’d imagined for them.)

Despite my fears, Fraŭlino Bernfeld continued to see me, and I was overjoyed to find her on Saturday, already laced up and on the ice at the Heumarkt Rink. I sat down near a brazier and pulled on my own skates. The day was cold, and my muscles were stiff, and I had to dig into the ice to keep up with her. I had promised myself, come what may, that today I would declare my love for her. I would take my chances, and there would be no turning back. However, though we skated side by side, chatting amiably, she dashed away consistently at the first sign of a romantic declaration on my part. “Fraŭlino Bernfeld! Wait! There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you,” I cried after her. But she pretended not to hear me over the glistening whiz of the ice, hurrying off, as an undulating
line of skaters whistled past me. My balance was thrown, and my legs went out from under me, and I dropped into the path of what looked, as he bore down upon me, like the national champion, moving with all the weight and speed of a locomotive engine. Unable to stop himself, he leapt over me instead — I was helpless to suppress a shriek — and skidded to an abrupt halt. I raised my arm, shielding my eyes against the prismatic sheen of icy sparks that fell across me, and struggled to sit up.

“Are you all right, sir?” he called out, resting his hands on his enormous thighs, his cheeks a cherry pink, steam issuing from his mouth.

“Fine, I’m fine,” I nodded irritably, muttering an unprintable epithet beneath my breath, unable to rise before Fraŭlino Bernfeld, having turned in time to witness my humiliation, skated to my aid.

“Mia doktoro! Kion vi faras?”

Seeing me stand and reassured of my well-being, the brawny skater flew off, but not before giving Fraŭlino Bernfeld a brisk masculine appraisal, ogling her person from the top of her hat to the point of her blade.

“Let’s get a warm drink, shall we? Some hot chocolate?” she said. Holding me by the arm, she led me through the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the skaters to the other side of the rink. We hobbled into the shelter. “Sidu ĉe la tablo, Doktoro, kaj me alportas du varmajn ĉokoladojn.”

“Jes, jes.” I obeyed her, seating myself at one of the shelter’s tables while she went off to get two hot chocolates. Feeling miserable, I watched the skaters whistling through the grey shafts of winter sunlight outside. The hut was heated by a number of braziers, and I was soon uncomfortably hot and had to unbutton my coat and unwrap my scarf. Waiting for the cocoa, Fraŭlino Bernfeld had begun a spirited conversation with the older man behind the counter, the owner of the concessionary by the looks of it. He had sucked in his belly and was standing straighter than he was clearly accustomed to. Fraŭlino Bernfeld rarely seemed to observe the transformation her presence occasioned in the men she encountered. For all she knew, the world was universally populated by a race of straight-spined, courteous gentlemen with little to do but pay exquisite attention to the woman standing before them. I couldn’t help but sigh. If this is the effect Fraŭlino Bernfeld has on all men everywhere,
what chance do I have of successfully suing for her affections? Indeed, what was I, really, but one more flirtatious concessionaire?

She picked up the steaming cups and made her way back to our table. “There now,” she said, setting down the drinks. “What a pleasant fellow.” With her chin, she gestured over her shoulder towards the man.

“Was he?” I said, unable to muffle the petulance that crept into my voice, although I knew it did nothing but make my company a burden to her, more especially in comparison with the other men who so agreeably surrounded her.

“I must remind myself to carry a stack of promissory cards. You don’t have one on you, by any chance?”

“I haven’t, no.”

“Pity,” she said. “He seemed interested. I think he’d make the pledge.”

She wore a large hat with a wide brim and a woolen scarf with tassels. With the soft points of her elbows on the table in a rustic manner, she held the mug of steaming cocoa in both hands and raised it to her lips. She kept it elevated before her face, looking over its rim at me, her head to the side in an expression of curiosity, as though she’d just noticed something about me that she’d never seen before.

“Are you all right, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

I gave her a chagrined look. “Am I all right, fraŭlino?”

“That is to say: you’re not unwell?”

“Unwell?”

“Are you feeling well?” she added helpfully.

“As a matter of fact, no, I’m not.”

“Oh dear.” She returned her mug to the tabletop and assumed a serious manner, putting aside, as a concerned friend must on behalf of a friend, the frivolities of chocolate. “You’re sick then, I take it?”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose I am.”

She edged back in her chair. “It’s a private matter?”

“Until now, it has been, yes.”

“Then perhaps it should remain so.” She made a small gesture with both hands as though she were drawing a border between ourselves and the subject. “I apologize,” she said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“But you’re not,fraŭino, and perhaps it’s time the malady were made known.”

“You
are
sick?”

“I am, yes.”

“Oh!”

“Lovesick.”

Amo-malsana, I said, an awkward construction, I’m afraid, Esperanto having no real word for “sick,” sickness being merely the absence of health. I preferred it, however, to amo-naŭzita — nauseated by love — although at the moment, I was so nervous this second construction did, perhaps, more accurately describe my feelings. It troubled me, if only distantly, that the international language lacked the subtlety that enabled one to express a pleasant misfortune in it. One fell in love, linguistically at least, in much the same way one fell down a staircase: the chaos of tumbling, of leaping, of trilling uncertainty, of not knowing what the next step might bring were similar, I thought. The neologism must have taken Fraŭlino Bernfeld a moment to decipher, for her expression of perplexed concern did not, for that moment, change. Then, all at once, she glowered at me with an almost too beautiful mask of irritation, exhaling briskly through her nose.

“You’re
in love
?” she said. She sounded annoyed.

“I am. Indeed.”

“With a
woman
?”

“Of course, with a woman! What do you take me for?”

“No, I meant: do I know her?”

“Ho, Fraŭlino Bernfeld!”

“Who is she?” she demanded. “Someone I know?”

“Yes, she’s someone you know.” I could take no more of this wretched playacting. “You know the woman quite well, in fact,fraŭino, as she is no one but yourself!”

“Oh …” she said, and then: “Oh.”

It’s difficult to describe the shifting expressions with which Fraŭlino Bernfeld met my declaration. Her face brightened and darkened. She smiled and unsmiled. She looked like a person approached on the street by a beggar who makes a number of pleasant inquiries, drawing his
interlocutor into a warm conversation, doing everything he can to make it seem as though he is not a beggar, before finally asking for five kronen. Indeed, Fraŭlino Bernfeld couldn’t have appeared more appalled if I had, in fact, asked her for five kronen.

“Mi povas nenion fari,” I said meekly.
I can’t help it.
I took a sip of my cocoa and fiddled with my scarf.

“Of course, you can’t.” She placed her hands around her mug of cocoa and stared unhappily into it. “However, I must tell you that I’m not …” She hesitated, and I waited in an agony of impatience for her to finish the sentence. “Not free,” she finally said, and the sad, consoling smile she offered me disappeared as quickly as it was offered. “I’m not free.”

“Of course not. How could you be?” I said. “A woman as beautiful as yourself.”

“No,” she said, and she brought her fingers to my lips, where she left them. “Don’t misunderstand me. I haven’t pledged my heart. It’s my father who has arranged everything.”

Ah, of course! The mighty Hans Bernfeld would never leave his only daughter’s marriage to chance.

“I liked you from the moment we met, Dr. Sammelsohn, I really did. You were so charming and so sweet and so silly, but … I wasn’t free. Despite my attraction to you, which,” she lowered her voice, “was intense, I knew I couldn’t get to know you in that way. I never imagined you’d really become interested in Esperanto, but I was hoping you might, so that we could continue seeing each other. Indeed, it was all I wanted, and when I received your note, I was so happy. I was so happy, Dr. Sammelsohn. You were interested in Esperanto, after all! Although what I really wanted you to be interested in was me. Although then I couldn’t have permitted myself to see you. You understand. I enjoyed our afternoons so much, but each time I thought you were on the point of declaring yourself, I tried to distract you, to change the subject, anything, because once you had declared yourself, it would be impossible for us to continue meeting under the pretext of language lessons, and then I knew we couldn’t meet at all!”

“Ho,fraŭino. I’ve been so thoughtless!”

“No, no, it’s all my fault,” she said. “I’ve been so stupid! I only see what’s
in front of me! And I had no right to lead you on!” She couldn’t have studied my face more intently were she preparing to reproduce its features for an art examination. “Ho, Doktoro Sammelsohn,” she murmured, “mia dolĉa Doktoro. Now that we’ve been honest with each other, and now that we know that we both feel the same way, what I’ve feared would happen has happened, and we must stop seeing each other.”

I moved my chair closer to hers and held her hands beneath mine. She was right, of course, and there was no use in fooling ourselves. “I’ll miss our daily hour together,” I said, as nobly as I could.

“And I as well.” A tear fell down her cheek.

I swallowed with difficulty. “Well, farewell then,fraŭino.”

“Farewell then.”

She nodded. Still, neither of us moved. She continued to study my face, and I hers. Gently, she uncurled her hands from inside mine and placed them upon the table. I acknowledged the finality of the gesture and began to stand, but before I could, she was pressing my hands again, keeping them locked tightly inside hers.

“Must we really stop?”

“Of course, we must.”

“Must we?”

What could I say? At a moment like this, a man of integrity, his declarations of love having been firmly, if regrettably declined, would protest that he could do nothing more than remove himself altogether from the young woman’s life. A man of substance would never permit himself to be demoted from a potent rival to an unthreatening friend, a sexless eunuch, invited into the most private chamber of the young woman’s heart, but barred forever from crossing the threshold of her more sublime affections. Happily for us both, I was not a man of integrity, but rather (as I’d been told my entire life) one of little substance.

And so, I heard myself saying: “Mia karafraŭino, if we promise never to act upon these feelings, and to never mention them again, not even to each other, to deny their existence as much as possible, even to ourselves, to root them out of our hearts as though they were emotional weeds, appearing to the world to remain exactly as we have for these last several months, as friends devoted passionately not to each other, but
to a common cause, then I see no reason why we cannot continue on as before.”

“Oh, Kaĉjo? Do you really think so?”

“If it would make you happy,fraŭino, I would do anything, yes.”

Another tear rolled down her cheek, falling slowly inside the track left by its predecessor. She pressed the back of her hand against my cheek. “It would make me so very happy,” she said.

“Then,” I said with as much emotional detachment as I could feign, “I will see you home today, and I will very much look forward to our hour of language instruction on Monday.”

WE WERE PLAYING
with fire, and we both knew it, though of the two of us, I had the less to fear.

As the winter worsened, we abandoned the Ring and took refuge in various coffee houses, principally my own, the Guglhupf, where, sitting by a roaring hearth, we chatted through the darkening afternoons, sharing questions about participle formations and adjectival agreement, or quizzing each other, with homemade memory cards, on the latest words coming out of Warsaw. I had no idea who my rival was. Fraŭlino Bernfeld discouraged all questions concerning him. Though she didn’t love him, and though he cared little for the cause, still, he was a good man. At times, she even felt sorry for him, blundering so optimistically into what promised to be a loveless marriage. I sensed this pity for him as a danger to myself. It could so easily uncurdle into actual love, and so my strategy was simple: I made no emotional demands upon Fraŭlino Bernfeld. Rather, I contrived to appear for our daily hour in the guise of my finest self, masquerading, in this way, as a utopianist, a dreamer, and a sexual renunciate, knowing that, in doing so, I would best this Herr Whomever, whom I felt certain was taking no similar precautions against me while in the company of his fiancée. And why should he? Knowing nothing of our rivalry, fearing it not in the least, he wished to be loved not for his best self, but, in the way of all men, for his true self. And this, I knew, would be his undoing.