A Curable Romantic (54 page)

He smiled icily. “Well, it’s not for nothing that our enemies accuse us of poisoning their wells.” He clapped his hands lightly against his thighs. “Good! Well then,” he said, “I’ve enjoyed our chat. Thank you, Dr. Sammelsohn, for accommodating me into your busy schedule. Under other circumstances, I daresay I might have treasured your acquaintance. As it is, I shall bid you good day.”

Though I saw Herr Bernfeld make no move to summon him, instantly Herr Goldberg was at my side, escorting me from the room. Before I knew it, I was back in the bitter cold, the severity of which mattered little to me now. I took a step towards the clinic. I couldn’t believe it! The old man had all but bowed to the ineluctability of Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s and my love! Despite his stern posturings, what was he but an old toothless tiger, growling for the sake of pride and fooling no one with his bite? Besides, I was certain in time I could make him like me. Upon what I based this certainty, I have no idea. (Unable to charm my own father, what hope did I have of charming Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s?) Still, I’d enjoyed his company, as he claimed to have enjoyed mine. Indeed, I felt sorry to leave him when our interview was finished. He was an undeniably attractive fellow, powerful, purposeful, and I could have listened to him for hours. His magnificent daughter, it turned out, was only the tail of an even more magnificent kite! In the face of all this, what did Dr. Freud’s treachery matter? Love had triumphed! Or if not triumphed, it had certainly prevailed. At least it hadn’t been entirely defeated. I loved fraŭlino
Bernfeld; she apparently loved me, and as long as this held true, what force of nature, what human being, could come between us?

It was all I could do to deliver myself to the clinic. Every fiber of my person ached to bisect the Ring and detour by Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s apartments. Despite everything, I was no Casanova. Duty called, and I obeyed its summons and was rewarded for my diligence by the midmorning delivery of mail. Among the white envelopes, like a lilac blooming on a snow-covered hilltop, was a note from Fraŭlino Bernfeld, the first I’d received in weeks. I tore it open.

“Oh, what a wise and noble father Heaven has provided me!” she wrote.

Ah, just as the old devil had predicted, his acquiescence to our love had elevated him even higher in his daughter’s esteem while leaving my status more or less the same. I impatiently skimmed through these paternal encomia for something more immediately concerning my own person: Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s proposal that we meet again daily for our hour of language lessons beginning that very afternoon over lunch in her apartments.

The favor of a reply was requested.

“Jes, jes, milojn da jesoj!” I responded rapidly.

“Very well, but I’m not sure you can actually say that in Esperanto,” she lectured me, meeting me at her door and holding up my note, having underlined my awkward, homemade idiom — milojn da jesoj: a thousand yesses — in red.

“I don’t care,” I said, taking the note from her hand and ripping it in two.

“Oh my!” she cried. “But we’re in high spirits today!”

Her maid Käthe helped me off with my heavy cloak.

“Hang them over the tub, Käthe,” Fraŭlino Bernfeld commanded, and when the girl had left the room, I took Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hand and kissed its furrowed knuckles before pressing my lips against the softer skin of her inner wrist. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply through her fluted lips. The little sizzling sound of her breath cut electrically through me.

“Mi estas tiel feliĉa,” she said, looking quite handsome in the grey
light of the foyer, her hair an extravagant mane, her chocolate-drop eyes peering into mine.

“Sed ne tiel feliĉa kiel mi.”

“We must go and tell our good friend.”

“Dr. Zamenhof, you mean?”

“The poor man.” Fraŭlino Bernfeld shook her head. “From his last letters, it seems he’s practically near despair. To know that his work has brought together two such happy lovers would cheer him, I think. It’s not right, Kaĉjo, that we should be the only happy ones, is it?”

I followed her to the table and to the meal Käthe had prepared. “I suppose I can cancel Monday’s patients and Friday afternoon’s, and we can go for a few days.”

“Marvelous!”

I took a sip of the wine. “But shouldn’t we write him first?”

“No,” she said, stirring her soup, “let’s let it be a surprise.”

The idea struck me as a poor one, but who could refuse Fraŭlino Bernfeld anything? Certainly not I, and so we made our plans: we would take the train to Warsaw to surprise Dr. Zamenhof with a visit, during which time we would announce to him our new love and (according to my own private scheming) our engagement. I wasn’t clear exactly how I planned to propose to Fraŭlino Bernfeld; I only knew that I would not return to Vienna without having done so.

CHAPTER 5

The sky was a milky grey, and the afternoon couldn’t have been duller. At three o’clock, I sent the last of my patients home and locked the clinic doors. Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I were to meet at the Südbahnhof. Arriving late, I caught sight of her, arriving later still. Our trip would consist of no more than two days of travel with two days in Warsaw, and I was perplexed to see her strolling down the platform followed by a porter toting a small caravan of boxes and bags. I’d packed only one small suitcase for myself, and her mountain of luggage made me nervous. As far as I was concerned, the Russian Empire was a wild and lawless place. One never knew when a maniac with a revolver or an agent of the secret police might step out from behind a baluster. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s bags would not only draw attention to us, but they’d make a dash to freedom all but impossible.

“I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to assassinate you from behind a baluster?” she asked, when I’d confessed these fears to her.

“My dearfraŭino, I can’t pretend to understand the reasonings of a madman.”

“And what information could you possibly give to the tsarist police?”

“None, and as a consequence, they’d never stop torturing me.”

“Tip the porter, Kaĉjo, and stop worrying. These bags are going only one way.”

I did as she bid me.

The train ride was uneventful, and we arrived in Warsaw early the following day. Fraŭlino Bernfeld wrote out the Zamenhofs’ address, 9 Dzika Street, for the coachman on a white card with a small mechanical pencil she kept pinned to the lapel of her frock. The man grimaced, eying our luggage. With so many colorful bags and gifts piled onto his groaning droshky — I could only imagine him thinking — he’d be a horse-drawn advertisement for marauders! He rubbed his hand across his whiskery
jowls, and when he removed it, in place of his frown was the grin of a plucky hero, minus a few teeth. Dangerous though it was,
he
would ferry the Fräulein to her destination, with me along for the ride. He gave me a hard and penetrating look. Who was I, anyway — her brother? her accountant? an annoying pest she wished to be rid of immediately? He would get her there, even if it meant leaving me in a roadside ditch.

We climbed into his cab. Warsaw seemed lost in a kind of grimy melancholia. Even the late morning fog felt dirty on my skin. The seats in the droshky were stained, and our horse limped along, farting, indifferent to the oaty detritus soiling its hindquarters. As we journeyed on, the streets became narrower and even more crooked, and we were almost face-to-face with some of the taller people walking along beside us. I reached for the latch on the droshky’s door and secured it. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s face tightened into a look of uncomprehending concern.

“How nervous are you really?” she asked.

“A little less now,” I assured her.

She brought the droshky’s blanket to her chin and sighed.

As the alphabets on the shop signs began changing — from Russian and Polish, to Polish, to Polish and Yiddish — I gathered that we had entered the Jewish Quarter. A raw-boned woman with an expressionless face stood in one doorway, watching us pass. Another sold herbs and tea from inside a coal bin’s delivery door. A white-haired man sat on a stone curb. Another in a worker’s cap tugged on a cigarette. Porters dozed on their boxes, as they did in Szibotya, their hands inside the mouths of their shoes. Wafting in and out on the wind was the sound of an ill-played hurdy-gurdy.

Finally, our coachman stopped before a large four-story building. “Dzika,” he cried, before whistling for a porter. Together, the two unloaded Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s things. I kept an eye on both men as they worked, certain neither could be trusted. The odors rising from the street — horse piss, manure, rotting fruit — added to my unease. I paid the cabman, tipping him excessively, as Fraŭlino Bernfeld had instructed me, although I suspected he was already taking advantage of our unfamiliarity with the currency. At the urging of the porter, we walked ahead of his wobbly cart, though I kept turning around to affirm that he was
still here, fearful the moment I ceased doing so, he would sprint off and disappear with our things through some crack in a wall where we’d be helpless to follow him.

“Ah, yes, here it is.” Fraŭlino Bernfeld pointed with her umbrella to a sign that hung beneath a pair of outsized spectacles. A dozen or so dirty faces crowded the consultancy window to get a look at the princess in her elegant blue cloak, standing beside her mountain of luggage. Drawn by the commotion, Dr. Zamenhof soon appeared at the door, dressed in his white medical smock. I saluted him with a little wave of recognition, which he didn’t seem to see. Irritation pinched his features as though he were considering an annoying puzzle that required an immediate solution:
What is everyone gawking at?
His eyebrows ascended, like hastily raised flags, as the pieces came together. Panic contorted his face. At last, he’d been caught out, his secret life exposed! (Again I told myself we’d done wrong by not notifying him of our plans.) His look of bafflement was followed by a grimace of resignation. There was nothing to do but present the most pleasant of faces to the world, and to the lovely people who had so kindly thought to surprise him. Still in his smock, he ran into the street, as though his only desire were to offer these two lost grandees directions for safe passage out of the neighborhood again.

“Majstro!” Fraŭlino Bernfeld called, oblivious to Dr. Zamenhof’s embarrassment. He smiled tightly, his cheeks as red as polished apples, giving no indication to anyone who might be looking on that this gloriously eccentric title belonged to him.

He directed the porter through the courtyard to the apartment upstairs.

the porter said.

I offered.

Dr. Zamenhof cried.