A Curable Romantic (50 page)

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.

I wrote back to her immediately, struggling with the brave, new words, even when it came to signing my own name: “Doktoro Jakovo Jozefo Sammelsohn.” Samelson? Samelsono? Zamelzono? I was uncertain if Es-perantistoj Esperanticized siajn nomojn, but I proceeded to do so with my own name, further announcing my allegiance to a cause that, I knew, was as near to Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s heart as the breath inside her lungs.

EACH DAY, FOLLOWING
our lunch, Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I walked the Ring, arm in arm, in a comradely fashion. I must say: it was a delightful experience, speaking this silly, made-up language with a woman as beautiful as she. And indeed, I cherished it as a delicious irony that on the Ringstrasse, that grand Deutschophonic wreath of a boulevard, the international language should prove, for the time being at least, the most private of idiolects. We could confer in our natural voices at their normal volumes with no one understanding us, and except for the very real fear that we might be arrested as foreign spies, we could speak our minds openly. The intimacy was exhilarating. I felt as though I’d inhaled a draft of Ramsay’s newly discovered helium gas: my voice sounded funny to me, and I felt as though I were floating above the clouds. As far as I was concerned, I’d found my happiness in the Fraŭlino’s person. When I was
away from her, I could think of nothing but being with her again; and when I was with her, I could think of nothing at all; and it was difficult for me to believe that I could feel this way if she in fact felt differently towards me.

However, since our first meeting in her apartment, when those looks of erotic curiosity had passed between us, she seemed to have reconsidered her attraction to me. Or perhaps I’d misinterpreted those looks in the first place. Naturally, I longed to clarify our standing, and yet I knew enough about myself to know that the anxiety attendant upon such an ambition would spoil my attempts to achieve it — indeed, each time I took a step closer to the subject, I could feel the Fraŭlino gliding away — and so I pushed for nothing.

We were in her mind, it seemed, merely
geamikoj
, “friends” in Esperanto,
ge-
being, as she informed me, one of Dr. Zamenhof’s most forward-thinking inventions, a prefix indicating that the word following it refers to members of both genders. “You see, Dr. Sammelsohn, hidden in the international language are all sorts of — oh, let’s call them linguistic promissory notes for the future.” Pro la venonto, she said: literally, “for that which will be coming.” “But then I see you’re laughing at me.”

I looked into her lovely face. Snowflakes glimmered in her hair and on her eyelashes and were melting on her cheeks.

“I’m laughing,fraŭino, yes, but not at you nor at what you’re saying. I’m merely happy to be in the company of someone who cares so much about something besides herself.”

She laced her arm again through mine, and we took a step forward. “These are, of course, just thoughts of my own. I haven’t spoken to the Majstro concerning any of this, you understand.” However, along the same lines, she’d noted other treasures hidden inside Dr. Zamenhof’s work: whenever possible, for example, thanks to the prefix
mal-
, words for negative things appeared to have no linguistic substances in themselves, but were merely the shadowy negation of their solar opposites.

“For example?”

“Oh, I don’t know …” she said. A pensive look dimpled her brow. “There’s no word in Esperanto for ‘old,’ for example. ‘Old’ is simply
malnova
, ‘not new’; or
maljuna
, ‘not young.’”

“Yes, I see, and what else?”

She squinted at the horizon of rooftops. “Well, theologically speaking, we say that evil has no substance in itself, that it’s only the absence of good, and interestingly enough, the Esperantan word for ‘evil’ also has no linguistic substance either. It’s simply
malbono
, the ‘un-good.’ ‘Darkness’ is the absence of light:
mallumo.
‘Sadness’ is
malgajeco
or
malĝojeco:
‘joylessness.’ The Majstro has never spoken or written about this openly. But in this way, I believe, the structure of the language harmonizes with its greater agenda.”

“Which is?”

She looked at me, as a schoolteacher might a student who’d mastered the entire curriculum, but still had no idea what the purpose of his lessons were. “Why, to produce goodness, of course!”

“Of course,” I said. “And I’m certain you’re right,fraŭino, although,” I couldn’t help teasing her, “in my own review of Dr. Zamenhof’s root words, I’ve noticed one or two exceptions to your rule.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the word
war
, for example,” which I uttered, by necessity, in German, “is
milito
, not merely
malpaco
, the
‘un-peace.’
“I felt cruel for having brought this vexing example to her attention, but charmed by the utter seriousness with which she approached it as a conundrum. Only because she took Dr. Zamenhof’s creation so seriously did a contradiction in its formation trouble her so deeply, whereas you or I might have simply shrugged off the entire thing. The day Dr. Zamenhof coined the word
milito
, we’d tell ourselves, was a day on which he was simply inattentive. Perhaps an abnormally heavy lunch had made his mind sluggish, and he’d forgotten his own secret principles.

“Yes, I’d noticed the same thing, and I’ve been meaning to write to the Majstro about it.”

“Or perhaps war isn’t always a bad thing, fraŭlino.”

“Now you’re just being stupid, Dr. Sammelsohn!”

“Just as love isn’t always a good thing.”

“Isn’t it?” she said, brushing my comment aside as lightly as she could. The truth is: I’d been waiting for the moment in which to bring the subject up. I could barely choke out the word
love
, it made me quite nervous
to do so. And no sooner had I pronounced it than I felt a chill move in between us. The fraŭlino stepped away from me and pretended to stare at a part of the street where nothing exceptional was occurring.

“Or have you never loved unwisely,fraŭino?” I asked her as innocently as I could.

“That’s not really an issue here, Dr. Sammelsohn.” She brushed my question aside. “Although I applaud you for bringing up the word
malsaĝe
as an example of what I earlier meant. Proving your point, Esperanto also graces us with the word
stulte
, from which we may derive the noun
stultulo
, which is a double for the word
idioto
, fools being apparently so abundant Dr. Zamenhof felt the need for more than one word to encompass them all.”

“So the answer to the question is ‘no’ then, I take it?”

“The answer to which question? I believe we were discussing war.”

“The question of whether you’ve never loved unwisely.” I trailed along behind her. “Or been loved in a way that was not pleasing — malplezura — to you?”

“Malplezuriga,” she corrected me. “However, I think we’ve exhausted the usefulness of this particular topic.” She turned on me fiercely, her expression a warning not to proceed with my reckless flirtations, and suddenly, the day was no longer as pleasing (malplezura? malplezuriga? malplezuriĝa?) as it had been. I peered into Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s face. She seemed to be biting back tears. Obviously I’d touched something in her to a degree I hadn’t intended.