A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “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?

  Unlike Dr. Freud, I had felt unfree to deny the experiences we’d shared in the company of the Angelicals. On the contrary, Ita’s plight had convinced me that there was another world, higher and truer than our own; and although I couldn’t return to the ways of my father, redonning the black garments of piety and reburdening my neck with the yoke of the Torah — I was a modern man, after all, and had no wish to reembrace the superstitious folk customs of previous generations — still, I was too much of a Jew not to hear the voice of Heaven hectoring me.

  (If, beneath its constant assault, my hearing sometimes dulled to its summons — well, that was to be expected: I was only human, after all.)

  The more I thought about it, the less absurd Dr. Zamenhof’s dream began to seem. Musical notation, weights and measurements, railroad gauges, the Braille alphabet had all been internationalized recently. Why not a universal language?

  I kicked off my bedclothes. My apartment was freezing, and I draped Aunt Fania’s afghan about my shoulders. With chattering teeth, I dashed barefoot to the kitchen and brewed myself a cup of coffee. It was nearly four in the morning, but what did I care? I was too excited to sleep.

  I retrieved Dr. Zamenhof’s booklet from the inner pocket of my overcoat and carried it to my desk. I cracked it open and read it through. Its introduction contained much of what he’d told me the evening before. He began charmingly enough: “The reader will no doubt take up this little work with an incredulous smile, supposing he is about to peruse the impractical schemes of some burgher of Utopia.” Still, it was clear, Dr. Esperanto claimed, that if the Great Wall of China separating national literatures were to fall, and people the world over could read the same books, their ideals, their convictions, their desires, and their goals would become aligned, and men would unite in a common brotherhood. Even without this utopian folderol, the immense importance of an international language to science and trade had to be admitted. Previous attempts had failed only because they were either too simple or too complex or too arbitrary. In short, there were three difficulties to overcome: the language must be child’s play to learn, its learners must be able to communicate with people of other nationalities whether the language is accepted universally or not, and some means must be found to overcome the natural indifference of mankind to the entire question. Dr. Esperanto had solved the first problem — “My entire grammar can be learned in one hour” — as well as the second — “With the complete vocabulary required for everyday use printed on a single page and available in any language for a few pennies, one may enter into an intelligible correspondence with a person of a different nationality.” As for the third and most intractable problem — convincing humanity to overcome its stupidity (these are my words, of course, and not his) — Dr. Esperanto had included in his booklet eight mail-in promissory notes, each stating that “the undersigned promises to learn Dr. Esperanto’s language, if ten million people publicly give the same promise.”

  These notes, easily detachable from the back of the book, were to be mailed in to Dr. Esperanto, c/o Dr. L. Zamenhof of Warsaw.

  Additionally, the booklet contained six literary specimens, including the Lord’s Prayer (“Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo, sankta estu Via nomo”), and the first verses of the book of Genesis (“Je la komenco, Dio kreis la teron kaj la ĉielon”), as well as the Sixteen Rules of Grammar and a pocket-sized crib with a bilingual vocabulary list comprising the then-extant nine hundred root words.

  As I read over these, my eyes began to glaze, and I saw in the book’s pages not Dr. Zamenhof’s words, all pressed in their starched serifs, but the face of Loë Bernfeld, superimposed, like a rotogravure, upon them.

  “Oh, Fräulein Bernfeld,” I murmured, “speak to me of genders, of numbers, and of cases!” Instead she spoke of a new world, a happier world, her dark blonde hair undone, the collar of her blouse unbuttoned so that if I tilted the book at an angle — oh, thrilling prospect! — I could peer down her collar and see the indentations of her bare throat.

  A door in the hallway creaked, and I was suddenly awake. The cold, hard pages of Dr. Esperanto’s booklet stared back at me. Fräulein Bernfeld was gone. The sun rose late at this
time of year, and it was still dark outside. Amazingly, I discovered that I’d committed most of Dr. Esperanto’s grammar, through this odd somnambuliterary process, to memory. Faster than Tolstoy! Ha! I flattered myself, dressing for the day. Also I was not, as I expected to be, the least bit tired. On the contrary, I felt as though I’d slept in the softest of beds for a solid week!

  Bound for the clinic, I knocked into Otto Meissenblichler’s latest süss Geliebte as she slipped out his apartment door. We greeted each other through a squall of guilty blushes and embarrassed guten Morgens. She had the blurry look of someone who’d put on her clothes after having taken them off without sleeping in between. Well, I told myself, Herr Meissenblichler is not the only one with a new love this morning! This thought of Fräulein Bernfeld reminded me of Dr. Esperanto’s pamphlet, and I returned to my apartments to retrieve it, so that I might take it with me. Nine hundred root words were no small matter, and I wanted to begin on them immediately. As I dropped the booklet into my coat pocket, one of its promissory notes fell out: “I, the undersigned, promise to learn the international language, if ten million people publicly give the same promise.”

  Ten million people! I had to laugh. It seemed an enormous amount. After all, how many copies of his little booklet had Dr. Zamenhof printed, anyway? Nevertheless I signed the note and deposited it in a mailbox, thinking more of Fraŭlino Bernfeld, I have to admit, than of the other nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine samideanoj, of whose number, that morning, I was proud, thrilled, in fact, to count myself.

  • • •

  I WROTE TO the Fräulein immediately upon arriving at the clinic and received her answer by return post. I tore open the envelope, lavender in both color and scent. Though I’d addressed her in German, she’d written to me in the international language, and it took me the better part of an hour, locked inside my examination room (with my patients amassing outside) to decipher her short message, working between her note and Dr. Zamenhof’s list of root words. As her office was not far from my clinic — she aided her father, Hans Bernfeld, in his trade — she suggested we take our lunch at the same hour. She would walk towards the hospital, I towards her father’s office, and arriving in the middle, we could share our lunch in a coffee house while studying la internacian lingvon, or chatting in it when my skills became proficient to do so. Unfortunately, today she’d already scheduled the hour and the next day’s as well, but the day after, she was free, and she would keep the time open every day henceforth, if I found myself in agreement with her plan.