A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “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?”

  Before either Dr. Zamenhof or I could speak, the marquis had sent his charge, one of the Graf’s littler sons, into the kitchen for a coffeepot and pastries, and the child was now struggling underneath the enormous weight of the tray.

  “Another napoleon?” he inquired. “They’re quite good.”

  “Quite good,” Dr. Zamenhof agreed.

  “From the finest patisserie in all of Rouen!”

  “Thank you,” I said, taking another one, although I’d had quite enough of the hard dry things.

  The marquis watched the boy leaving the room with the heavy tray. Crumpling up a half-finished letter that lay on his bedside table, he said, “Pay no attention to this. I place intentional spelling errors in all my correspondence in order to test the children.”

  With two twisting moves of his hands, he resharpened the points of his mustache. He glanced out the window, and the lenses of his pince-nez filled with a white light.

  “Now,” the marquis suddenly said, “you must hear me out on this.” He clutched Dr. Zamenhof’s hand. “Now you must promise me that Esperanto shall never be reformed. You remember how you erred
in ’94, offering the language up to the reformists! Why, if it were left to you, you would have torn your work to bits long ago! But in the meantime, either Esperanto has become stronger or you have become weaker. You know with what constancy I’ve always supported you, and I’ll continue to act in this way. Still, I must tell you the truth: your genius is so great that it seems to actually rob you of your ability to perform in the role of master over the rest of us. Now, we must swear to each other, as duzenbrüder, as samideanoj — which is a term, did you know, Dr. Sammelsohn, that I myself coined — but more important, as men who have given the best of their lives to our cause, that we will stand firm against these disastrous calls for plibonigoj, for so-called improvements and reforms. As you know, as everyone knows, as I myself have written to you countless times, bowing to the perfection of Esperanto, which I recognized immediately, I abandoned my own Adjuvanto.”

  He pronounced the word as though it were the name of a long-dead mistress.

  “Adjuvanto, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said to me, “was my own universal language scheme and the work of a considerable number of years. Indeed, I was quite far along with it, but it was nothing compared to Esperanto.” The marquis shook a scolding finger at Dr. Zamenhof, who, by habit, had begun to demur. “You see, that’s his problem. He’s too modest. No, he is! And where will they stop, these reforms? Today it’s the accented letters; tomorrow the accusative -n; on Wednesday, this one can’t bear the Slavonic roots; on Thursday, another thinks the vocabulary must be more French. Who knows what Friday and Saturday will bring? The only thing I can assure you is that there’ll be no resting on the Sabbath. And in the meantime, what will happen to my grammar and my textbook?” His voice sharpened to a querulous point. “These are real books, Majstro, and not the little pamphlets you yourself have distributed. Our adepts cannot be expected to replace their entire libraries! And furthermore,” the marquis said with a sudden ferocity, “it works! Esperanto works! Why, the language is perfection itself!”

  “On that score, Marquis,” I said, in the hopes of hurrying the conversation along, “you and I are in complete agreement.”

  The marquis sipped his coffee in a distracted manner and stared out the window. He sighed, as though he’d been charged with a necessary task he found distasteful.

  “And yet,” he said, “the thing we all must remember is this: France is not Russia. And though you Russians might model yourself upon our superior culture, the exchange is like a river: it does not flow backwards. Here in France, we are coldly intellectual. We are rationalists — we pride ourselves on this — with no warmth in our hearts left over for any sort of mysticism, whether Russian or Jewish or” — here, he curled up his nose — “Jewish, especially in light of ex-Captain Dreyfus whose shame continues to taint our nation. Now don’t misunderstand me: I cannot blame the Jews, like Javal, who blind themselves to Dreyfus’s perfidy. How could they not side with the traitor as one of their own? However, the Frenchmen who do so disgust me.”

  Dr. Zamenhof shifted in his hard wooden chair. Our time was growing short, and the marquis’ falling out with Dr. Bourlet had yet to be resolved. Now was perhaps the only time before the congress a rapprochement might be essayed between these two former friends. Since arriving in Paris, Dr. Zamenhof had been beaten and battered with the news of their squabble. Before our cab had even pulled away from the train station, Carlo Bourlet had stuck his bearded face in through the window and said, “Before the day is through, Majstro, a word, please, about these publishing contracts!”

  There’d been no time to speak of it then, but the following day, Dr. Bourlet pulled Dr. Zamenhof aside. “Though I’m loathe to bring up a delicate matter, Majstro, I must, concerning Monsieur de Beaufront.”

  Dr. Bourlet had gone to great lengths to secure a publishing contract for Esperantan books with Hatchette & Co., a leading Parisian firm. When the director of that firm insisted that everything be overseen by a French agent fluent in the international language, Dr. Bourlet had recommended not himself, but the marquis. Upon careful examination, Dr. Bourlet was consternated to see that the contracts the marquis arranged ceded to himself the lion’s share of the profits, while binding Dr. Zamenhof to the firm more or less as a slave for the rest of his life. The contracts furthermore gave the marquis the right to approve or disapprove all such books published by Hatchette, while restricting the rights of Esperantists to publish with other firms, thus conferring upon his person all the powers of the Christian savior on Judgment Day: he alone would choose between the saved and the damned.

  “No one is suggesting that the marquis will misuse these privileges,” Dr. Bourlet told Dr. Zamenhof with an unhappy smile, “but it certainly gives him an enormous amount of clout over his friends as well as his enemies in the movement.”

  “I’m not a legal man,” the Marquis de Beaufront said with a sigh, when Dr. Zamenhof at last broached the subject, “and I can assure you I take no delight in having exposed myself to the animus of so many of our friends. Surely you believe that, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  “The discussions were well beyond my competence. Indeed, it was criminal of Dr. Bourlet to place me in this situation! I had absolutely no idea what that Hatchette fellow was proposing. He spoke in circles, he flattered me. ‘Sign this, sign that,’ he said, shoving the papers in my face. Now I don’t wish to speak ill of anyone, but Bourlet certainly seems to have used me as his straw man.”

  “The contracts will have to be redrawn,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  “That goes without saying,” the Marquis de Beaufront agreed. He hugged his thin arms and looked out the window again. “I’m a victim of a terrible misunderstanding.”

  “Ah, yes,” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  “It was all an honest mistake.”

  “Of course it was,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “and I’ll try to make Dr. Bourlet see it as such.”

  I could only sigh. Esperantists battling each other and refusing to speak? It’s not exactly what Dr. Zamenhof had in mind back in 1878, singing songs around a birthday cake. Do human beings really require a universal language in order to misunderstand each other? or to refuse to speak to one another? If samideanoj couldn’t attain a common understanding, what hope was there for the rest of the world? Not much, it seemed.

  On the drive back to Paris from Rouen, Dr. Zamenhof and I rode in silence, he no doubt reviewing his conversation with the marquis or perhaps thinking about the world and all its troubles or else making plans for the congress in the days ahead; and though I was happy to have accompanied him on this difficult excursion, I had only one thought in my head and that thought, of course, was: Loë, Loë, Loë.

  CHAPTER 9

  Finally, on the day we were to depart for Boulogne, fraŭlino Bernfeld and I found ourselves standing near each other on the platform of the train station. With a distracted air, as though she were trying to recall who I was, she explained to me that she’d decided not to ride in third class with the Zamenhofs, but to continue on in first class, blaming a headache.

  “Besides they don’t need me looking out after them anymore. They’ve quite arrived, haven’t they? After a week in Paris, they’re as famous as Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves!”

  “Fraŭlino Bernfeld,” I began to plead with her.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn?” she addressed me in a formal tone, as though we had not spent years courting, but had only recently met. The look of remoteness was so innocently and yet so furiously displayed upon her face that for a moment I found myself believing it as well, or if not believing it then at least behaving as though we were strangers. So although I wanted to say, fraŭlino Bernfeld, my darling, let us tear up our tickets and find a rabbi and persuade him to marry us immediately, all I in fact said was: “Can I help you with your bags or at least summon a porter for you?”

  “I can manage quite well on my own, Dr. Sammelsohn, thank you very much,” she said, turning on her heels. “Ĝis la revido!”

  ĜIS LA
REVIDO?

  Were these to be the final words fraŭlino Bernfeld addressed to me, a jocund-sounding lie uttered in the language of universal truth? Ĝis la revido. She had no intention of ever seeing me again. If our paths crossed at the congress, as they were certain to — these were not yet as well attended as they would become in later years — she would no doubt confront me from behind a similarly unbreachable fortress of elegant manners and amiable words. As I took my small, uncomfortable seat in third class, I did so unresigned to my fate: fraŭlino Bernfeld was no longer, if she had ever been, mine. Everything had come about exactly as her father had predicted. (Or perhaps even mandated.) But it was true: for all my fopperies, I remained a backwards Galitsyaner, unschooled in the gay sciences, a novice in the matters of the heart. Had I learned nothing of women since my father revealed the mysteries of sex to me, without the aid of helpful diagrams, by quoting the Hebrew scriptures? I slumped in my seat, or as much as the cramped space permitted me to, and sighed. No one took notice. Sinjorino Zamenhof was busily teasing a cooing Lidja. Dr. Zamenhof was working away, his briefcase serving again as a makeshift desk. I had to wonder: Was fraŭlino Bernfeld merely elongating the emotional distance between us so that I would be forced to cross it, striding resolutely towards her in order to unelongate it, or did she truly wish never to see me again? I sighed a second time, so lost in my own thoughts that I must have been staring at Dr. Zamenhof for a long minute or two before realizing he was looking back at me.

  “Daydreaming,” I explained. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”