A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  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 certa
in 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.”

  “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 a
t 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.