A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Of the hundred million men mobilized on all sides, sixty million had been wounded and thirteen million killed, and though I’m loath to admit it, this left a considerable number of war widows in my immediate vicinity. While in other cities, jubilant soldiers marched in their victory parades, it was the women belonging to men they had slaughtered who paraded through my apartment and into my bed, a long line of comely widows, each a numbingly infinite variation on but a single theme. And though we were all very kind to each other, and grateful, I suspect, for these hours of reprieve, the sense that we were standing in for others — they for Loë, and I for scores of men — performing on their behalf an act they would not (in Loë’s case) or could not (in the case of the dead) perform, made of our couplings a grinding and repetitive business.

  And one grey morning, bleary from a short night in the arms of a not terribly beautiful stranger, breathing in the soft fumes of her halitus, I extricated myself from bed and stood at my window, my thoughts turning east. Dr. Zamenhof had not survived the war, it’s true, but his children had, and among them, as I recalled, were two lovely daughters.

  God only knew how they were faring, orphaned and alone. As I stirred a curative dose of sugar into my coffee, for the first time in what seemed like ages, I sensed a glimmer of hope rising with the sun.

  Perhaps a visit from Uncle Kaĉjo was in order.

  OR ONKLO KAĈJO, rather.

  As the porter led me into the vestibule, I calculated how many years had passed since fraŭlino Loë and I had visited, and the answer I arrived at was: nearly twenty-five! Certainly I was no longer the young swain I’d been. On the contrary, in the intervening years, I’d become that most ridiculous of persons: a bachelor in his late middle years. Upon our greeting one another, however, I could detect no astonishment in either Adamo’s or Zofia’s eyes at the grey-bearded gentleman standing before them.

  No, as I’d been an adult when they were children, I appeared to them as I always had, as an old man; and this was my first indication, received as soon as I’d crossed their threshold, that Zofia would never consent to be my lover, to say nothing of my wife. Additionally — and it pains me to confess this — she was no longer la bela junulino I remembered from the early congress days. Gone was the little girl who’d so dopily anticipated my proposal to her onklino Loë. In her place stood a stout matron with an incipient mustache. (She’d had a rough few years, I’d learn over dinner that evening, serving as a medic in either the Russian or the Polish army, I can’t remember which, while her brother served, as a medic as well, in the opposing corps.)

  Nevertheless, she greeted me warmly. “This way, Onklo Kaĉjo, and we’ll show you to your room.”

  Dr. Adamo, tall and courtly, took my arm, and guided me towards the stairs. “You remember Lidja, of course,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said, although when I’d seen her last, she’d been a toddler in her mother’s arms, and this was an image that I found I couldn’t excise from my mind. Though a willowy woman in her twenties, she seemed as much a baby to me as she always had, and I realized with a pang that my dream of finding a bride among la Zamenhofidinoj was simply one more impossible scheme.

  (Why must everything concerning the Zamenhofs fall into that category?)

  It was all I could do not to turn around, descend the stairs, hail a taxi, depart for the train stations, and return to Vienna at once. In fact, the only thing that stopped me from doing so, besides my own social cowardice — which has stopped me from doing half the things I’ve wanted to my entire life — was the sight of Wanda Zamenhof, Dr. Adamo’s young wife, who, at that moment, joined us, stepping into the foyer from the kitchen, drying her hands on a kitchen towel.

  The introductions were quickly made, and I took her in with the rapacity of an old starving wolf, devouring her optically from the cap of her ruby-blonde head to the meat of her calf, and was startled, as I did, to find a child hiding behind her shapely legs.

  “Well, well, well, who’s this then?” I said, crouching down to greet him. His fingers digging into his mother’s thigh, he hid his eyes against her skirt. The adults all laughed. The boy was dressed in a little sailor’s suit, which seemed an odd touch to me, given the family’s pacifism. He’d obviously wanted to greet the visitor but had found himself, at the decisive moment, too shy to do so.

  “Now, Lutek,” one of his aunts said, her admonition making him peek out at me.

  I offered him my hand. “Doktoro Jakovo Jozefo Sammelsohn.”

  “Ludovic Zamenhof,” he said in his tiny voice.

  (His parents had named him after his grandfather, of course.)

  “Care for a lollipop?” I reached into my coat pocket for the sweet.

  He shook his head fiercely and withdrew even further behind his mother’s skirts. Still crouching, I gazed up the tower of her legs. Staring down at the two of us, she took the candy from my hand, and by way of apologizing for her son’s rudeness, said, “Perhaps he’ll feel differently after dinner, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

  AS THEY WERE too polite to do so, it was I who brought Loë up, later in the evening, when we were all seated around the dining room table.

  “Yes, we occasionally hear from la sinjorino,” Dr. Adamo replied. “In fact, she recently sent funds for Father’s tomb.”

  “Ah, did she?” I said.

  “I believe she’s on the point of remarrying,” Zofia said.

  I nodded grimly. “So I understand.”

  “And you’ve never thought of remarrying, Onklo?” Lidja asked.

  As though caught off-guard, I glanced up from my aperitif, leaving my lips on the rim of the glass. Returning the drink to the table, I said, “Well, that’s precisely why I’m here, Lilke.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, to see which of the two of you will have me.”

  The laughter occasioned by this remark was so open and affectionate, so joyous and mirthful and sweet, I couldn’t fail to understand how ridiculous, how utterly impossible, the notion of my marrying one of them seemed.

  At the sound of his parents’ and aunts’ laughter, little Ludovic let out a squeal.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Sammelsohn,” Wanda said, pressing her hand onto the top of mine.

  “Kaĉjo,” I corrected her.

  “I’ll be happy to adopt you.” She said this in what I hoped was at least a mildly flirtatious way, and once again, the table erupted in laughter.

  “Would you like that?” Zofia asked Ludovic. “Would you like an elder brother?”

  “No!” the boy screamed at his aunt. To his mother, he said, “No, Panjo! Only me!” He began to cry in earnest, his face as red as a beet, his lungs thundering like a bull-roarer.

  “Aw, now, now, Lutek, no, no,” his aunt Lidja cautioned him, tutting her tongue.

  “It was just a joke,” his father explained, helpless to placate the boy. “No one’s adopting Onklo Kaĉjo.” He pulled an apologetic face at me. “Isn’t that right, Onklo?”

  DESPITE THE WEEKLY meetings of the Warsaw Esperanto Society, held in their parlor; despite Poland’s new postwar independence; despite the Jewishness of the Zamenhofs themselves, the Zamenhof household was a Russian household, and it wasn’t long before I’d become one of those characters one finds in a Russian play. You know what I mean: a friend, though not a dear friend, living for ancient and unexplained reasons on the family estate.

  None of the women paid any attention to me. Lidja, under the spell of Bahá’íism, spent her days learning the sacred Bahá’í texts and petitioning the Holy Guardian Shoghi Effendi for permission to travel to the holy city of Haifa; Doktorino Zofia was busy with her house calls and her hospital rounds; Wanda was a happily married woman devoted, through her own work as an oculist, to that of her husband. Even the maid demonstrated no true interest in my person. Though at the age of thirteen, I was a boy a jilted girl might throw herself into the river over, the only member of the Zamenhof household who seemed to identify me as a sexual threat was its three-year-old
son.

  Nevertheless, I delighted in the warm atmosphere of their home, and my visits, which lasted longer than I intended, began occurring more frequently than necessary. Sometimes I spent half the year in the little room Zofia had set aside for me, reading my books and pining away for Wanda. I was here, I told myself, to help Dr. Adamo run his father’s old consultancy, and not to steal his wife, and yet, each time I visited, Wanda seemed only more beautiful to me. I denied my feelings as much as I could, and certainly I acted upon none of them. I held her yarn when she knitted, I lit her cigarettes, I brought her cups of tea, aware that to press my suit further was to risk my place inside their little family. Still, especially in the early years, when she still possessed the weighted breasts of a new mother, it was all I could do, as we listened in the parlor to Dr. Adamo playing cello in an amateur quartet, not to stare at her bosom and imagine myself falling asleep there, my head in the soft cleft between them.

  I WAS IN Warsaw when Dr. Zamenhof’s monument was unveiled. His grave had been marked until then by the humblest of markers, and among Klara’s final wishes had been the hope that samideanoj the world over might raise the funds for an appropriately magnificent tomb. The work had been fraught with difficulties. The sculptor, a local madman named Lubelski, had insisted upon Aberdeen marble — “Ah, the grey of Aberdeen, Dr. Sammelsohn,” he told me after I’d volunteered to take over the project on behalf of the Zamenhofs, “is a grey of which Warsaw, which knows much of grey, knows nothing!” — and as a consequence, the work had taken ages. When the stone finally crossed the North and the Baltic seas, and I traveled to Danzig to meet Pan Lubelski and to claim it, I was mortified, as was he, to see that certain typographical errors had crept into the inscription. As though Idist pranksters had sabotaged it, the inscription contained circumflex accents where none was needed.

  Clutching at his heart, Pan Lubelski nearly rent his garment at the sight of these diacritical marrings. “Miecystam Lubelski shall never permit his name to remain on such a monstrosity!” he told me, referring to himself, as was his habit, in the third person. Instead, he browbeat me into purchasing a new ticket for him to Aberdeen, and he boarded the ship and disappeared with the stone. I was afraid I’d see neither of them again, but shortly before the ninth anniversary of Dr. Zamenhof’s death, the one turned up with the other in tow. Klara, however, had not lived to see the day. She lay buried beside her husband, a circumstance that made the occasion even more bittersweet.

  According to the newspapers, nearly five hundred people attended the ceremony. I don’t know how they calculate such things, but I can attest to the fact that the crowd was enormous. A crisp stand of Esperanto flags snapped in the breezes above the monument, which Pan Lubelski had draped with a heavy black cloth. The greenery surrounding the Zamenhofs’ graves had been landscaped into the shape of a five-pointed star. An honor guard of students, bearing more flags, stood at attention, and next to them were representatives from the Jewish community and the Esperanto Society and various other organizations. Reporters and photographers jostled with government officials for a place near the front. I stood as close to Wanda as decency permitted. My lovesickness was then at its most feverish. Her somber clothing and her pale complexion gave her a soulful look, and I found myself imagining her, standing years and years hence in a similar attitude at my grave, mourning the love neither of us had had the courage to declare.

  At eleven o’clock precisely, Professor Odo Bujwid, an ancient friend of Dr. Zamenhof’s, cut the ribbon, and with a magician-like flourish, Pan Lubelski ripped the black cloth away. The monument was unveiled: a tower of granite blocks upon which sat a beribboned globe. A small, sad cheer went up. The choir, cued by its director, sang “L’Espero.” Various speeches were made. Dr. Adamo, representing the family, placed a white wreath at the foot of the tomb, and other wreaths soon followed.

  At one point, my attention was arrested by a sight I hadn’t thought to anticipate. A couple I couldn’t quite identify stood on the far side of the Zamenhofs’ grave. The woman, her hands in a fur muff, seemed distraught; the gentleman, in a bowler hat, less so. Indeed, he looked rather bored. Once he even dropped his head back and yawned before opening his watch and glancing at the sky, checking his timepiece against the position of the sun. It was only when the woman caught my glance and looked at me directly that I realized — with an alarmed constriction of the heart — that it was Loë and the most recent of her many husbands.

  SHE’D HAD SEVERAL between our marriage and the present moment, and I was pleased to see that she came to the reception, following the ceremony, without him. She stood across the Zamenhofs’ parlor with a drink in her hand, leaning her head against the wall, dressed from head to toe in black, the corona of her golden hair shot through with handsome ribbons of grey. I couldn’t help staring at her, though she refused to return my glance or acknowledge me in any way.

  As those of us gathered around the piano finished singing “L’Espero” and the poet Leo Belmont began sharing his memories of the Majstro, Loë allowed me to look at her for the first time without turning away. She nodded her head almost imperceptibly towards a door before departing the room. An electric jangle shivered my spine. I tamped my cigar out and searched for a place to leave my glass. Though I nearly knocked over an end table, righting the vase before it fell, no one seemed to notice as I crossed the parlor — Wanda was busy greeting late-arriving well-wishers — and slipped out of the room.

  There was no one in the hallway by the time I’d entered it, and I walked its lengths wondering if I hadn’t imagined the entire thing. The day, the monument, Pan Lubelski’s arrogance, the crowd of samideanoj, the Majstro’s absence and Klara’s had had an oppressive effect on me. In my current mental state, it would have been easy to imagine all sorts of things. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen a Minotaur in the middle of the parlor, sharing its memories of the day the Majstro had liberated it from its labyrinth.

  But no, finally, a door cracked open, and through it, I heard a suddenly too-familiar voice whispering: “Ho, Kaĉjo! In here, darling. I’m in here.”

  THE ROOM WAS the laundry room. Clean-smelling sheets had been hung up to dry, and the afternoon sun, blazing through the windows, projected violent rose and blue rectangles on their snowy-white surfaces. Folded and stacked in wicker baskets were our sleeping garments. Loë stood before the heater, fretting her fingers together and apart. The years had been extraordinarily kind to her, I must say. She seemed a richer version of herself, older, yes, but even more striking, the small amount of extra weight making her hips and bust beneath her clothing appear as though they’d ripened. She met my eye, and I was overcome by a sense of lust-inflected remorse, if such a sentiment exists.

  “Oh, now I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to tell you.” She lifted her hands in a gesture that wasn’t quite a shrug, and for a small time, neither of us said anything at all.

  Finally, I said, “Well …”

  And she said, “Yes?”

  But then I shook my head as though I too had forgotten what I’d wanted to say.

  “The monument was quite …”

  “Oh, that Lubelski …” I laughed ruefully.

  “No, no, you did a wonderful …”

  “What a madman to work with, really.”

  She lowered her head and laughed through her nose.

  “And was that your … ?”

  “Husband?” She supplied the word I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce.

  “Ah. So he is your… ?”

  “Husband. Oh, yes. Oskar,” she said, and she laughed, as though at something ludicrous. She bit her underlip. Her tooth left a small indentation in its skin. “But I suppose there are other, more pleasant topics to discuss.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “And have you … ?” she said, peeking up at me from beneath her brow. I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t understand her. “Married?” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “No. W
ell.”

  “Remarried, I should have said.” She shrugged prettily. “Married again, I meant.”

  “No. There’s been … no one, really.” I shrugged as well.

  “No one? Really?”

  “They’re all … married, I suppose. Including — ”

  “Don’t say it, Kaĉjo.”

  “ — you.” I refused to be censored.

  “Ho!” she said.

  “Well. Just look at you.”

  “Enough!”

  “You’re just so beautiful.”

  Too late to stop me from pronouncing the word, she covered my mouth with her hand. And then, of course, I kissed her, or rather she kissed me, or rather I’m not certain who kissed whom. Perhaps we’d kissed each other. Certainly, I’d started by kissing her hand, which she’d placed against my mouth, but instantly, her arms were around my neck, mine were around her back, and we were grappling, as though we couldn’t quite bring ourselves near enough to each other. Her face flushed against mine, and I could feel its heat. The tears on my cheek — hers? mine? I couldn’t be certain — were hot.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” she said. Breaking away from me, she dried her cheeks with the heel of her hand, and the little muscle between her eyebrows tightened. Straightening her clothes, she looked as if she were about to call a policeman. She took a step away from me. “You’re not preying on these people, are you, Kaĉjo?”

  “On the Zamenhofs, you mean?”

  “Because they’re still very much in grief, you know.”

  “How dare you suggest such a thing!”

  “Are you out of money?”

  “Am I what? Loë!”