A Curable Romantic (62 page)

“As I was saying,” Dr. Javal confirmed.

“And who should know better?” Captain Lemaire said.

Dr. Javal pursed his lips and honked out a little one-note laugh, as though wildly flattered by Captain Lemaire’s tribute.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his jacket, Captain Lemaire said, “And because we both feel so strongly about the issue” — he removed a portable exchequer and a pen — “and because we understand how much time and effort go into a question of this magnitude, we’re prepared to finance your work on the necessary reforms with a check, from the two of us, worth two hundred fifty thousand francs. That should cover all your expenses, Dr. Zamenhof, don’t you think?”

A quarter of a million francs! Having recently converted my money for the trip, I knew this was no small fortune. In those days, a newspaper cost half a franc, a glass of beer ten centimes. A Parisian laborer made between four and ten francs a day; a professor between thirty-two hundred and eighty-five hundred francs a year. A quarter of a million francs was unheard of. Dr. Zamenhof and, if the money were well managed, conceivably all of his descendants unto eternity, would never have to work again.

“Why, you could move here to do the work,” Dr. Javal said, gesturing towards the oval window of his library and, through it, to the Seine and to the exquisite city spread out below it. “Quit Warsaw and live among us in Paris where you properly belong.”

Not content to dangle the offer before Dr. Zamenhof in a theoretical or abstract way, Captain Lemaire filled out the check, endorsed it with his signature, removed it from his exchequer, and placed it delicately upon
the coffee table so that Dr. Zamenhof could clearly read what was written there. No one seemed to know what to say. In a silence full of barbs, I felt a stab of sympathy for Dr. Javal. Silent, we were as good as invisible to him. Or perhaps not. He cocked his ear and shrewdly said, “Think on it, that’s all we ask. Sleep on it, and we’ll speak of all this later.”

CHAPTER 8

I returned to the hotel, registered for my room, and was stepping away from the front desk when the concierge, a small man with a waxed mustache in the shape of an archer’s bow, called out to me. “Monsieur le Docteur?” he said.

“Oui?” I said.

“La mademoiselle has left this for you.”

“Ah, merci.”

Inside the metal cage of the elevator, I tore open the envelope and read fraŭlino Bernfeld’s note:

Kapdoloron, mia karulino.
Vidos vin morgaŭ?.

                    
L.

I sighed with relief. fraŭlino Bernfeld had suffered a headache and would see me, her darling, in the morning. If unwell, she’d probably have gone early to bed and would consequently have no idea at what hour I’d returned nor how long I’d been away and therefore wouldn’t be especially angry with me. Nevertheless, after unpacking my own bags, I descended again in the lift and found her suite.

“Fraŭlino Bernfeld, mia kara,” I knocked softly upon her door. “Estas mi.” I leaned an ear against the door and heard a flurry of rustling: bedclothes, skirts, God knew what else. “Fraŭlino?” I knocked again. “How is your head, mia karulino?”

“Foriru!” she cried. “Go away! I don’t ever want to speak to you again!”

“Dr. Javal was quite long-winded,” I told her. “Open the door and I’ll tell you all about it.”

A surprisingly crude epithet followed, attaching itself to Dr. Javal’s good name.

“Would you like to get dinner?”

“Leave me alone, I said!”

A rather dour-looking couple made their way down the hall past me, the woman in furs, the man in a black homburg. Feeling as though I’d been caught out in the commission of a crime, I greeted them as graciously as I could, raising my eyebrows towards the gentleman, as if to signal to him, by semaphores, the message
Women!
He scowled at me in return, his chin dimpling.

“Fraŭlino Bernfeld!” I whispered when the couple had finally passed. “Let me in and we’ll discuss this. Please?”

Her voice rose in volume and pitch with each word — “If you don’t leave now,
I! WILL! SCREAM!”
— until she was, in fact, screaming.

“Everything in order here?” The man in the black homburg turned back, as did the woman on his arm. She stared down at me furiously from behind her nez retroussé.

I had no choice but to depart the hallway immediately.

In the morning, fraŭlino Bernfeld did not join me for breakfast in the hotel café. Rather, pretending she hadn’t seen me at my table, she let herself be called over by a small crowd of samideanoj and persuaded to eat with them instead. Though I eyed her continually between paragraphs from behind the duck blind of my
Le Figaro
, she disappeared without a good-bye, timing her departure so perfectly I missed it. Since Dr. Zamenhof was being taken by Dr. Javal to visit the minster of education that day, I was left on my own.

I saw nothing of fraŭlino Bernfeld the following day. She refused to accept or return the messages I sent hourly to her room. She begged off from the tour of the Esperanto Printing Society, led by Professor Cart; and when, afterwards, I arrived at the elaborate banquet hall of the Hôtel de Ville, I discovered her place card had been separated from mine. My seat, a place of honor, I had been originally told, was now farthest from the podium and nearest the kitchens. And although she
did
attend the party at the Eiffel Tower, somehow among the crowd and the buzzing journalists peppering Dr. Zamenhof with silly questions in le restaurant russe, she managed never to find herself next to me, though, nauseated with vertigo, I spent the evening pinging and ponging from the tower’s
north side to its west side to its south side to its east side in search of her. Days passed without a word, and when Dr. Zamenhof asked me to travel with him to Rouen to visit le Marquis de Beaufront, I was happy to have a reason to quit Paris.

LE MARQUIS PIERRE
Josselin Gerard Eugène Albert Louis de Beaufront was France’s preeminent Esperantist. In 1888, while on vacation in Antibes, he had encountered a review of Dr. Zamenhof’s
Dua Libro
in an illustrated gazette, and from that moment on, he had devoted himself to the movement. Indeed, it was through his efforts alone, as I’ve said, that Esperanto had even survived. As Dr. Zamenhof’s sole Western adherent, it was the marquis who had smuggled la sanktan lingvon out of tsarist Russia, as it were, to Paris, whence its light soon spread to the rest of the world.

The marquis was truly indefatigable. Not only had he founded la Société pour la propagation de l’espéranto and established the journal
L’Espérantiste
, he’d set up classes in Paris with a tiered series of competency exams. Further, he seemed to know everyone. His address book bulged with eminent names, and he’d blazed through it, winning an ever-growing number of France’s intellectual and scientific luminaries to the cause. Indeed, it was thanks to the marquis that men such as Lemaire, Javal, Cart, and Sébert were counted among Esperanto’s most devoted friends.

“We owe him much,” Dr. Zamenhof said to me, riding in the car we’d hired to ferry us to Rouen. He picked a twig of tobacco off his tongue and dropped it onto the car floor with a fluttering of his fingers. “He really
is
Esperanto’s Second Father, as he’s called. And unlike Dr. Javal, who is a thousand times his moral superior, the marquis insists with real passion — certainly with more than I could ever muster — that the language must never be reformed or changed.” Dr. Zamenhof looked moodily out the window. “How can one not love a man like that, foolish though he may at some times be?”

The villa where the marquis lived was perhaps the most beautiful I’d ever seen. A palace at the end of a long winding drive, it sat atop a tall green hill. It took our taxi nearly twenty minutes to carry us from the
front gates to the house itself, where the butler seemed perturbed that we had rung at the front door. It was only after we’d been redirected to a small cottage in a nearby grove that the truth began to dawn on us: the marquis was not the master of the house, nor even a guest here; he was, rather, an employee, a tutor hired by the estate’s owner, the Graf de Maigret, for his children.

As Captain Lemaire had explained, the marquis had not come to Paris to greet the Majstro owing to ill health. By all reports, ill health plagued the poor fellow, and upon entering his cottage, we found an invalid lying in his bed, his long, thin body hidden beneath half a dozen quilts. The marquis seemed to be drowsing, and Dr. Zamenhof was forced to clear his throat in order to announce us.

“Dr. Zamenhof?” the Marquis de Beaufront said weakly. “Is that really you?”

“Along with a friend, yes,” Dr. Zamenhof said. We took a step nearer the marquis’ bed. “May I present to you Dr. Sammelsohn?”

“Ah,” the marquis said, raising himself on an elbow and squinting at us, an unalloyed look of disappointment transfiguring his face.

“If the marquis is too ill to receive us,” Dr. Zamenhof suggested, taking the poor man’s pulse, “we’d be only too happy to return at a more convenient time.”

Of course, he was only being polite. There
was
no other time. It’d been difficult enough to fit this trip into his busy schedule.

“Such small men,” the marquis said, taking a better look at us through the pince-nez he’d fished out from the blouse of his nightshirt. Frowning critically, he laughed at himself. “I had expected — I don’t know what — a colossus, I suppose!” The marquis fiddled with his hair, which he wore in a long hank on one side of his head in order, I assumed, to cover his baldness. “In any case, I apologize for meeting you in this state of dishabille.”

“And what exactly ails the marquis?’ I asked as politely as I could. I had the uncharitable impression that all those blankets were piled on top of him not so that he might sweat out his fevers, but rather that he might simply sweat and appear, therefore, feverish.

“Non, non, non,” he said, “let us say
tu
with one another, shall we?”
He graced me with a benevolent smile. “Let us be duzenbrüder, as the Germans so aptly phase it.”

“Good. Thank you.” Dr. Zamenhof meekly bowed his head, as though the marquis had bestowed upon him a significant favor.

“Now, do, come, sit near me, here by my bed,” the marquis ordered us gently, “so that we might talk.”

Dr. Zamenhof and I found rustic chairs in the kitchen and brought them to the marquis’ bedside.

“Very well then,” the marquis said. “Shall I relate to you how I came to be ill?” Before speaking further, however, he leaned over his bedside table and retrieved a wet towel from inside a pewter bowl. “One moment,” he said, dampening his face; when he removed the cloth, the twirled ends of his mustache, which had previously pointed towards the ceiling, pointed towards the floor, and his short beard glistened with the droplets of water. “Ah, that’s so much better. The visions are starting to recede now.”

“Visions?” Dr. Zamenhof said.

With one trembling hand, the marquis waved aside the question. “It’s my own fault, really. Though who wasn’t young and foolish once?” He searched our faces for looks of sympathetic approbation. “It all began when I was a fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, I suppose. By the way, that’s the only diploma of mine Father ever kept. He had no interest in anything else, really. Indeed, everything else” — he gestured with an extravagant flick of his wrist — “he threw out. But Oxford — oh, my, how that impressed him! But Papa was like that, I’m afraid. My dissertation in theology he lost on a hunting expedition, before he’d a chance to read it. Or so I assumed. He never told me what he thought of it, in any case. I rarely saw him. I was raised by the servants, I suppose one could say.”

The marquis poured a small amount of medicinal powder into a glass of water, stirred the mixture, and drank it down.

“I’d been handpicked by Max Müller to work as his assistant. I was so naïve at the time I had no idea who Max Müller was nor that he was world-famous. Nevertheless, it was my job to assist the great man in his translation of the Rig-Veda and the Upanishads. English, I knew, of course, from my granmamá, who looked after me in the summers, but at the time, of my twelve languages, Sanskrit was the shakiest. And so I did
what any young man would have done, what you yourselves would have done in my place, I suppose. Over Christmas, I traveled to India to improve my grasp of it; and there, to my enduring shame, I left, though only for a short time, the straight and true path of our church. I apprenticed myself to a yogic master called Swami Sri Giri. Now Swami taught me, imperfectly as it turned out, the Vedic art of slowing down, if not stopping altogether, the beating of one’s heart. Despite the dangers to myself and despite repeated vows on my part not to undertake these rigorous devotions alone, I couldn’t help myself — I was
that
hungry for spiritual enlightenment — with disastrous results, naturally.” He gestured ruefully to his diminished body. “My health was wrecked. I came down with a terrible case of typhus in a filthy hotel room in Lhasa, waiting to be summoned for an audience before the Dalai Lama. The day was rainy, torrential, as I recall, but I went to him, sick though I was, and I’ll never forget what his Holiness told me. ‘Monsieur le Marquis,’ he said, taking my hands in his, ‘a dark time is coming. If we do not protect ourselves from deceptive acts, everything we hold dear may be exterminated.’

“Now, he thought he was speaking of Tibet, of course, but I knew better. He was speaking of Dreyfus. What else could it be? And why else would he have confided this warning to a Frenchman?” The marquis lay back in his sickbed. “In any case, my health was gone, and when I returned home, I discovered that the family fortune had been lost as well. I was only twenty-two at the time.”

He cleared his throat and hid his hands inside the sleeves of his worn gown. “One does go on, doesn’t one?” He wagged his finger at us. “But then you’ve drawn it out of me. How did we even get on to this subject in the first place?”