A Curable Romantic (61 page)

“To
our
Esperanto,” Dr. Zamenhof corrected him.

“To which,” Michaux boomed, “Dr. Javal has generously dedicated his funds and his own vital energies.”

“And for which we are profoundly grateful,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

A servant brought in coffee and pastries, and we were invited to sit. A bullet-headed man, Dr. Javal kept a wonderfully serene expression on his face, though I admit the tinted glasses were unnerving. His beard was a tangle of blackish wires, shot through with grey, and his hands were as thick as a butcher’s. Yet one had only to watch him preparing the pousse-café to see the great skill his surgeon’s hands retained. Ascertaining the precise location of the cups, the sugar cone, and the sugar nips, he unerringly ferried three perfectly nipped pieces of sugar into each cup before pouring a perfectly measured dollop of cream into each as well — he must have been counting silently — a dollop that raised the level of each beverage a perfect two centimeters beneath the lip of each cup. His own cup he then brought, lacking indecision, to his mouth.

“Ah!” He swallowed this first sip with a great show of gustatory delight. “Eating and drinking is for the blind the greatest of pleasures. Especially, may I say, in excellent company.” Crossing his legs, he leaned back in his chair and clapped his hands together. “Now, Dr. Sammelsohn …” he said.

“Yes?” I said, leaning forward.

“Tell us …”

“Yes?”

“You’re a friend of Dr. Zamenhof’s?”

“I am.”

“And an oculist as well?”

“That is correct.”

“In Vienna?”

“Yes.”

“And an acquaintance of Sigmund Freud, I believe.”

“Correct.”

“And so you know Dr. Breuer, I presume?”

“Slightly.”

“An excellent man.”

“So I understand.”

“Related to me through marriage.”

“That I didn’t know.”

“Next time you see him, ferry to him, if you will, my kindest regards.”

“I will.”

“And welcome to Paris.”

“Thank you.”

“And to our home.”

“Thank you again.”

“It’s good to make your acquaintance.”

“And yours.”

Done with me, Dr. Javal turned to Dr. Zamenhof. “And now, Dr. Zamenhof, let us hear, let us hear: How did the three Zamenhofs and their friends enjoy their journey? Was your arrival in our magnificent city satisfactory?”

Faultlessly polite, Dr. Javal allowed Dr. Zamenhof to warm to his company by relating nothing of importance. In this way, the two men, who knew each other only through a correspondence conducted in neither man’s native tongue and dominated by Esperantic concerns, might relax together, if only for a moment, before rolling up their sleeves and digging into the work that obsessed them both. Dr. Zamenhof chatted amiably, enwombed in a shroud of cigarette smoke, while Michaux listened avidly.
The light pleasantries exhausted, the subject moved on to the congress, and the three men discussed Dr. Zamenhof’s Parisian itinerary for the next few days. This included a trip with Dr. Javal to visit the minister of education, and another with Professor Cart to tour the offices of the new Esperanto Printing Society. A formal banquet at the Hôtel de Ville and a party at the top of the Eiffel Tower were part of the festivities as well. Interviews with journalists couldn’t be avoided, Dr. Javal warned Dr. Zamenhof, despite his well-known reserve.

Sitting a little to the side and trying not to think of the tongue lashing I would receive from fraŭlino Bernfeld when I returned to our hotel, I reflected upon how gratifying it must be for Dr. Zamenhof to have such high-minded and accomplished men rallying to his cause. If only his father could see him! Or more to the point: his father’s notorious friend, the one who’d warned Markus Zamenhof that the boy’s invention was nothing but a sign of incipient madness! And what of my own father? How astonished would he be to see me sitting here, invited as a guest to this magnificent home on le boulevard de la Tour Maubourg, sipping pousse-café with intellectuals and aristocrats? (Oh, how I would have loved to have blackened his eyes with the sight of me here!) But fathers, I mused, in relation to their sons at least, were as blind as Dr. Javal.

After a bit, Michaux rose and apologized. He was late for a dinner appointment and must excuse himself. “Please don’t get up,” he said to Drs. Javal and Zamenhof. “And don’t let me further interrupt your conversation. Carry on, do. Although, Dr. Sammelsohn, if would you be good enough to walk me out, there’s something I’d like to discuss.”

“You might not want to leave those two alone together for the nonce,” he told me at the front door, towering over me by at least a foot and a half.

“And why is that, sir?” I said, looking up into his face. Dr. Javal seemed nothing if not absolutely dedicated to the Majstro.

“I’ll say nothing more,” he continued, sotto voce, “in the hopes that it will come to naught.”

“Very well then,” I said, inspired by his sense of gentlemanly decorum.

We shook hands, my head barely reaching the tip of his beard. When
I returned to the library, Dr. Zamenhof and Dr. Javal instantly ceased their talking.

“Dr. Sammelsohn is one of my dearest friends and a confidant,” Dr. Zamenhof said, breaking the awkward silence. “I assure you there’s nothing you can say to me that can’t be said, in confidence, before him as well.” Dr. Zamenhof’s gentle eyes crinkled in an almost Oriental expression of glee. I nodded back, grateful for the compliment.

“Very well then.” Dr. Javal sat a little higher in his chair. He cleared his throat unsuccessfully and was forced to take a sip of coffee. He smoothed down his beard with three brisk strokes, achieving nothing: the tangled wires remained every bit as tangled as before. “This is difficult for me to say. And I know that you have worked for a long number of years perfecting la internacian lingvon, Doktoro Ludoviko, and that during that time, you’ve been fair and open-minded about considering various reforms. Some would say too fair, too open-minded.”

This was true. It was well known that in 1893, having founded the League of Esperantist, an organization comprising any and all subscribers to
La Esperantisto
, Dr. Zamenhof (under pressure from Trompeter, then his main backer) called upon its members to propose any changes each thought necessary, after which all suggestions would be submitted, as referenda, to a democratic voting procedure, an approach that meant that anyone with forty kopecks for a subscription to the gazette had as much say in the shaping of the language as its most subtle and sophisticated speakers, including its creator. Dr. Zamenhof not only excluded himself from the voting but adamantly refused the many blank ballots sent to him by subscribers who urged him, the only man qualified to make such decisions, to use their votes in whatever manner he saw fit. Even with the vote thus potentially weighted against him, a clear majority was obtained in favor of keeping the language as it stood.

(What is less well known — and what certainly was not known to Dr. Javal — was that before the vote Dr. Zamenhof secretly urged members of the St. Petersburg Esperanto Society, whom he knew to be conservative in all matters of reform, to purchase multiple subscriptions to
La Esperantisto
so that their agenda might carry the day. Dr. Zamenhof felt an artist’s love for the details of his creation, I think. After all, he’d spent
eighteen years, lavishing upon it all the love and attention one might upon a beloved child.)

“But none of that was in the least scientific,” Dr. Javal complained, and not without cause. “Science is not a democratic affair, and very little of value has ever been created by committee, if anything at all.”

Dr. Zamenhof nodded silently, apparently forgetting for a moment that Dr. Javal was blind. “Jes, estas la vero,” he finally thought to say. “Daŭrigu.”
Yes, it’s the truth. Proceed.

“If nothing else, our congress next month will demonstrate the ease with which Esperanto can be used in conversation, in presentations, in literature, and in drama, but it may also reveal certain flaws and failings, and many reforms will then suggest themselves to us from practical use.”

Dr. Zamenhof began to say something, but Dr. Javal, seemingly unaccustomed to being interrupted, raised one of his thick butcher’s hands — “Let me finish!” — and Dr. Zamenhof of course relented.

“You merely wish to demonstrate, I know, a liberal openness to new ideas, as well as an antipathy towards appearing — forgive the unfortunate religious analogy — as some sort of language pope, unlike Herr Schleyer, demonstrating, in the meantime, your benevolent regard towards humanity as a whole. I know you offered the language gratis to the American Philosophical Society and have made no financial profit from it aside from what an author of books in any language is entitled to expect. Your integrity — let us be frank, your
saintliness
— is not in question here.”

Time was getting away from us. The late summer sun shone through the oval windows of Dr. Javal’s library so fiercely, I had to cup my hand to my forehead to shield my eyes. I knew, with a queasy sense of certainty, that the longer I remained, the more irate fraŭlino Bernfeld would become. I pulled my watch from my vest pocket, wondering if the slinking sound of the chain sliding against itself might signal a sense of boredom to the alert ears of the blind Javal. He turned his head slightly, so that his cochlea was facing me. I coughed and crossed my legs, hoping the sound of my pants scissoring against themselves might hide the fact that I had opened my watch.

Dr. Javal opened his own watch — the face had no glass — and gently probed it with his thumb. “Seven o’clock, Dr. Sammelsohn. Is there somewhere you need to be?”

“He’s left his fiancée at the hotel, I’m afraid,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

“Ah!” Dr. Javal chuckled merrily.

“Fraŭlino Bernfeld is not actually my fiancée,” I corrected Dr. Zamenhof.

“Hence, the lower boiling point for her womanly irritations.”

I was flummoxed. Why was it that everyone seemed to know so much more about women, as a general subject, than I?

“We’ll have you back to her by the next hour,” Dr. Javal promised.

“I assure you there’s no hurry.”

Though Dr. Javal was blind, I could swear at that moment that in response to my patent naïveté his eyes met Dr. Zamenhof’s in a conspiracy of gentle mockery. With his big, blocky hands, he poured us each another splash of coffee, spilling not a drop. “Where was I?” he said.

“Reforms,” Dr. Zamenhof said unhappily, two lines of smoke streaming from his nostrils.

“I’ll be blunt in the interest of love.” Here, Dr. Javal smiled in my approximate direction. “Though I can find little fault with your beautiful creation, Doktoro Ludoviko, there is but one thing, one small but not insignificant thing that I must, as a man of science, as a physician, and most important, as an ophthalmologist, protest.”

“And that is?”

“Its use of accents.”

I leaned forward, interested again.

For the sake of clarity and simplicity (“one symbol, one sound”), Dr. Zamenhof had freed Esperanto of the clutter of blended consonants. To this end, its orthography employed six accented letters, five with a circumflex accent (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ) and one with a breve (ŭ). Though the accented letters serve as a flag — the informed reader knows immediately that he is reading Esperanto and no other of the hundreds or thousands of languages beside which it will live worldwide — they present a certain difficulty when it comes to most, if not all, typewriters and printing presses.

These practical concerns were not, however, at the heart of Dr. Javal’s reservations. Leaning forward in his chair, he allowed his voice to drop. He sounded as though he were sharing with us an as-yet undisclosed scientific discovery. “I’ve become convinced through my researches and also through my work with patients for over forty years that, along with yellow paper, seemingly innocuous graphological accents create a dangerous level of eye strain, needlessly subjecting the precious organs to threat, and often resulting in damage that can lead to blindness.”

Now it was Dr. Zamenhof and I, as though we were one man staring at himself in a mirror, who offered each other identical looks of astonishment. The presumption seemed absurd. But how could we say as much? We were both lowly oculists, Dr. Émile Javal a world-famous ophthalmological authority. His inventions, which we used every day in our dusty, shabby consultancies, stared down at us from their immaculate exhibition cases, accusing us, as it were, of reckless behavior, of inventing, in Dr. Zamenhof’s case, and of promulgating, in both of our cases, a language with a typography so dangerous, reading it might — what? — scratch the cornea? How sharp did Dr. Javal imagine those circumflex accents to be? (As sharp as Louis Braille’s awl?) And yet how could we argue the point with a man who was, in fact, blind? (I made a rough calculation: from things that had been said during our conversation, I’d gathered that Dr. Javal starting losing his sight as early as 1884 and was completely blind by 1900. He’d become an ardent Esperantist only in 1903, so at least his Cassandra-like warnings were made without personal grudge.)

“You’re considering the argument’s merits,” he said into the silence, although clearly Dr. Zamenhof was considering nothing of the sort. The argument had no merits. Why not imagine
t
as a dangerous dagger or
y
as a low-hanging branch? How could a circumflex accent be any more straining to the eye than, say, an ampersand, that convoluted piece of plumber’s piping?

“Your remarks are quite just,” Dr. Zamenhof said, as politic as ever. “The accented letters are an inconvenience, and truly, I would be happy if they’d never existed. However, now is not the time to speak of reforms …”

“Ah, Captain Lemaire,” Dr. Javal said, before Lemaire had entered the room. “How good of you to join us.”

The dashing young businessman, pushing his hair into place, found us in the library. He had, by his own report, driven to the Javals’ on his motorcycle.

“We were just discussing the supersigns.”

“Ah, yes, the accents, Dr. Javal,” Captain Lemaire said, taking a seat. “A very dangerous affair, that.”