A Curable Romantic (52 page)

We both looked forward to our hour together as the sweetest part of our day. Thefraŭino enjoyed my company clearly — I won’t say she
preferred
it, having no idea how much she enjoyed
his
— and she made a virtue of our self-willed naïveté: as long as we remained convinced that our love was as hopeless as we claimed, she could continue my lessons with an easy conscience. She was like a missionary’s daughter tutoring a lovesick cannibal, never imagining that her own heart might be at risk. She enjoyed flirting, moth-like, with the immolating fires of our mutual attraction, bathing in the heat of my yearning admiration. Our conversations were filled with utterances we stopped ourselves from making, with sighs that revealed as much as they concealed, with soul-stirring glances that, while breaking no code of decorum, were, at the same time, too intimate, too frank.

Each afternoon, at our farewell, we indulged ourselves in an exquisite drama of passionate renunciation.

“Adiaŭ, mia fraŭlino.”

“Adiaŭ, mia doktoro.”

“Ĝis.”

“Ĝis la.”

A look darkens her eye.

“What is it, my dear friend?”

“Nothing.”

“I know.”

“If only — ”

“Yes, but we must not speak of it.”

“No, of course, you’re right, and so …”

“Good-bye.”

Still, neither of us moves.

“Is it hard on you, Doktoro?”

“Terribly hard, fraŭlino.”

“And yet you bear it?”

“Gladly.”

“I feel so cruel.”

“Don’t. Never. Not for a moment. No.”

“Oh,” she sighs.

And I sigh as well.

And of course, it didn’t last, nor could it. As high-minded as fraŭlino
Bernfeld may have been, and as dutiful a daughter, no one, and certainly no woman, is without her vanity. Though we’d agreed upon remaining friends, and though (in her thinking) I’d forfeited all hope of her love, the truth was she had yet to surrender possession of mine for her; rather, she kept it, like a secret cache of chocolate from which she occasionally nibbled. How pleasant to flatter oneself with the hopeless love of another, how pleasing to imagine oneself so beautiful a woman, so rare and exquisite a specimen, that a man might choose a life of celibacy rather than coronate another woman upon the throne of his heart, a woman inferior, perhaps, to the original in all qualities but one: her actualness. And isn’t it among the heart’s greatest sorrows to realize that a person we’ve rejected, though once hopelessly enamored of us, has found a new object for his love?

At our bimonthly Esperanto meetings, which I attended regularly, I bestowed my attentions a little more ardently upon a young lingvistino named Suzanne Kiniower. She was sweet enough, if a little sad and too insecure to suspect that my attentions towards her were anything but real, and too used to romantic disappointment to depend upon them continuing.

“We merely shared a dinner,” I informed fraŭlino Bernfeld the following afternoon at the Gulphupf, when she’d all but forgotten herself and accused me of emotional treachery, “as du samideanoj might. fraŭlino Su-zanno merely wished to go over the differences between active and passive participles” (one of the most difficult features of Esperanto, I’d found).

“As though you’re an expert!”

“Of course, I’m not an expert, but I feel more secure in the topic than she. And in any case, what am I supposed to do with my evenings? Sit at home like an old maid?”

“Do you find her attractive?”

“Ho, fraŭlino! What a question!”

“Do you?”

“Of course not!”

“More attractive than me?”

“We’ve been over this a thousand times. What does it matter who I find more attractive? You’re affianced.”

“Please stop reminding me of that!”

I feign an exasperated indulgence, crossing my arms and fiddling with my cuff links. “Do I complain when you go out with
your
fiancé?”

“It’s hardly the same thing.”

“No? And how is it different?”

“We’re engaged! We
have
to spend time with each other.”

“Now you’re not making any sense.”

“I can’t believe you could be so hateful!”

And on and on, until at last she is apologizing, in tears, kissing my hands and begging me for my forgiveness: “Oh God, I’ve put you through such hardship! And it’s my own fault. No, it is. I’m so selfish and so cruel!”

The other advantage I held over my rival was the fact that, with my increasing fluency, I’d become even more convinced that Esperanto’s goal of universal understanding
was
a cause worth fighting for (or rather worth
not
fighting for). For most of the world, certainly, the enterprise seemed quaintly absurd, I supposed, a subject for the opéra bouffe: world peace and universal brotherhood obtained through the use of an artificial auxiliary language. But was there ever a more excellent goal? And did it matter that, in order to reach this summit of human excellence, one had to babble like a baby in an imaginary tongue? I was ashamed of myself for ever thinking of Dr. Zamenhof as a crank and of his followers as utopian lunatics. Had my heart so hardened that it couldn’t be moved by a Zamenhofic belief in the ultimate goodness of man? What of value was ever obtained by cynics and realists anyway? Indeed, what sane-seeming man ever achieved anything of value? What modest clerk, hoarding his meager wages, ever advanced the cause of humankind one jot? With a renewed sense of high-mindedness, I plighted my troth to our movement, not caring whether doing so made me more attractive to fraŭlino Bernfeld or less, though I knew it made me more attractive.

And this is what finally doomed her engagement: the fact that she could admire me without reserve. Like her father, her fiancé, I gleaned, merely indulged her passion for Esperanto. (It was more than a passion; for a time, along with W. H. Trompeter, the German surveyor, Fräulein Loë Bernfeld was one of Dr. Zamenhof’s most generous benefactors.
Indeed, there were times when she kept the entire movement financially afloat.) While conceding that an international language might be a boon to trade, neither Hans Bernfeld nor his future son-in-law found himself attracted to its utopian underpinnings, and both, I’m told, considered it a frivolous and womanly affair.

The more indifferent I seemed as a lover to fraŭlino Bernfeld and the more dedicated as an adherent I became to our cause, the more profoundly did she endure the weight of her unhappy betrothal, and the more inflamed became her jealousy when I dallied with other women, until, one black and wintry afternoon, when I’d seen her home, entering with her into the foyer of her apartment building in order to escape, even for a brief moment, the miserable cold, I bid her quickly adiaŭ and tipped my hat.

However, as I turned to leave and as she turned from me to ascend the stairs, our wrists lightly touched. The spark of skin against skin was like an electric convulsion that bound us in its current. Like the heads of two electric eels, our hands slithered around each other’s arms until they found one another. Our fingers intertwined. Something sharp on her ring nicked my skin. We were facing now, moving towards each other in the moist chill of the unheated foyer, her arms bracing my neck, my arms her waist. She lifted her mouth to mine, her lips parted, and I kissed her, my pince-nez steaming up and blinding me until, jostled by her hungry mouth, the lenses, perched until then crookedly upon my nose, fell from it altogether. (The fear that they might be damaged, pressed between her body and mine, was undermined as I reassured myself: You’re an oculist, idiot, and can replace them at cost!) Breathing in the rainy scents of her skin, biting into her pillowy lips, her head falling back as I kissed her plump throat, which trembled beneath my mouth like a small, captured rabbit, I listened to her murmur quietly and achingly, her breath a wet rasp in my ear, her open mouth tracing a moist line across my cheek until it again found my mouth.

Then suddenly her mouth abandoned mine. Her head dropped against my breastbone. She hid her face between the lapels of my coat. With her hands grasping onto my suit jacket, she pressed her elbows into my abdomen, bracing herself against me. Was she trembling or laughing or
weeping? I had no idea. I kissed the top of her head and tried to kiss the tops of her hands, but she lowered them away.

“Ne, ne, ne,” she cried, her forehead still pressing against my chest.

“Fraŭlino,” I whispered.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, without looking up at me. “Mention this to no one.”

But instead, some force propelled her, and she was instantly kissing me again, her mouth expressing beyond its physical powers all the yearning we’d renounced for each other for so long. Unable to face me, she gathered up her sopping hat, which had fallen to the ground and, modestly raising her skirts, ran for the staircase, tripping on a loose cobble before falling to her knee.

“Fraŭlino!” I cried, reaching out to her.

“Ne, ne!” She blindly gestured me away. “Estas nenio. Bonan vesperon, Doktoro Sammelsohn, bonan vesperon.”

Righting herself, she ascended the stairs and, without a glance backwards, disappeared onto the landing above.

CHAPTER 4

On Monday, as I knew it must, a note from Papagenogasse arrived for me at the clinic. I put off opening it for as long as I could, stashing the envelope in my pocket but immediately taking it out again. I hid it beneath a pile of patients’ charts and managed to forget about it for all of ten minutes. I was on the point of placing it in my medical bag when my hands, acting on their own, picked up a letter opener and tore the envelope to shreds.

With the deepest of apologies, Fraŭlino Bernfeld begged to be forgiven for the forfeiture of our lesson for the day. On Tuesday, it was the same: “Morgaŭ, morgaŭ, mi promesas!” However, the morrow brought only another lavender note, and this one, instead of begging off for the day and promising me the morrow, canceled our lessons until I should hear from her otherwise.

I wasn’t surprised. When had my love life ever run smoothly?

Having failed to thwart the will of my own father, a petty tyrant with no real power, what hope did I have, standing against Herr Bernfeld, a man of actual substance and means? Still, I kept up my daily Esperanto studies, telling myself that there was no point in falling behind from despair, although who was I deceiving? I had no one to speak the language with, and in any case, I could barely concentrate on my studies. I began a translation into Esperanto of Dr. Freud’s new book,
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, but lost heart early on when I came across the aliquis dialogue, a barely fictionalized account of my first conversation with him, designed obviously to eradicate all further traces of me from his life. I lived through my days like a sleeper who forces himself to remain in bed, hoping to begin redreaming a beautiful lost dream. Every hour, I checked the post, and when finally I received a letter from the Bernfeld residence on Papagenogasse, it was not in its customary envelope nor, as I saw when I’d opened it, was it in Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s pretty hand.
Instead it was a note from Herr Bernfeld himself, summoning me to his club:

18 March 1902
Dr. Sammelsohn,
  I would be grateful to you for the favor of a face-to-face encounter.

Sincerely,
Hans Bernfeld

A face-to-face encounter? As I scanned the page, the disagreeable thought struck me that I’d been summoned to a duel! Such things were not uncommon in Vienna, even among its Jews. Indeed, the young members of these new Jewish fencing clubs proudly displayed, to the left of their mustaches, the cicatrices that now destroyed the symmetry of their faces as for centuries they had those of their Catholic brethren. In a panic, I read the note again. Although there was nothing friendly about Herr Bernfeld’s missive, on closer inspection, neither did its intent appear lethal. Granted, the word
favor
seemed tipped with poisonous sarcasm, and the term
face-to-face
brought to mind an image of fisticuffs and bloodied noses; but otherwise the note was emotionless, brief and to the point. More important, I knew the meeting it proposed was my only chance of ever winning Fräulein Bernfeld’s hand. Our broken appointments spoke eloquently of a good daughter obeying even the harshest decrees of her stern but loving father. She had obviously gone to him immediately and told him everything; and as immediately, he had forbidden her to see me. The swiftness of her petition followed by his prohibitory decree were testaments to her feelings for me and to the threat my person posed to her father’s plans. Indeed, were I nothing more than a harmless language enthusiast, one more of the utopian cranks she welcomed into her apartments, our daily meetings would have been allowed to continue, as a fatherly indulgence to a daughter’s tenderhearted folly. If nothing else, for the first time, my feelings for a woman were being taken seriously, though this was hardly encouraging: when it came to fathers and weddings, my history was dismal.

I wrote back my willingness to meet Herr Bernfeld and received a
time for our appointment from his secretary, an Herr Emmanuel Goldberg, by return post.

THE DAY OF
my summons was one of those dark, cruel days too often imposed upon the Viennese during the winter. The sun never breached the woolen skies. I trudged through the snow, its flakes stinging my face, as though I were facing down an army of Chinese physicians. Taking every precaution, I’d bundled up in a cocoon of heavy winter clothing: a shapeless coat, thick gloves, a hood worn beneath my hat. Through an oval in its front, my face was exposed as little as possible to the elements. Around my neck, encircling it three times, so that it covered my chin, my ears, and even the tip of my nose, I’d wrapped a long scarf, and yet I trembled as I crossed the threshold into the Arcadia Club, and surrendered my things to the steward who greeted me at the cloakroom — if
greeted
is the word for such a sneering reception — impatiently holding out his hand for each item as I hurried to unbutton, unlace, unlatch, unloosen, and unravel the various garments I’d worn, until finally, I stood before him naked of my winterwear, weighed down only by an anxiety that rose in my solar plexus at the thought of my next task: winning from Herr Bernfeld the right to court his only child and heir.