A Curable Romantic (58 page)

Sore Dvore brushed bread crumbs from her hands and laughed politely before going on to paint for me a picture of her last few years. She had read Dr. Herzl’s pamphlet in the very gazebo where I had done my reading and had become enflamed with the idea of immigrating to the Holy Land. She’d joined Szibotya’s Zionist group, Khibat Zion, and with its three other members began raising funds to send a pioneer to the altneu homeland. When the first congress was announced, however, the group elected to apply its funds to sending a delegate to Basel instead, with Sore Dvore the unanimous choice.

“Oh, Father must have had a fit!” I said.

“On the contrary,” she told me, “he approved wholeheartedly.”

“Approved?”

“What sort of life was there for me in Szibotya, Yankl? Backwards old Szibotya! Father not only made the first but, as it turned out, the largest contribution to our cause.”

She leaned in, and her face grew serious. “Also,” she confessed, “I have a lover.”

“A lover? Really?”

“Are you shocked?”

“Would you prefer me to be?”

“Of course!”

“Then I am.”

“Sincerely?”

“If that’s what you wish.”

“No.”

“Then no.”

“Good.”

“And the name of this mysterious suitor?”

“Zelig Mintz.” They had met, she told me, at the Congress, and this Zelig Mintz had already settled in Rosh Pina. They were to meet up there, God willing, and be married shortly after her arrival.

I smiled as though at an astonishing turn of events, although in truth,
my heart was breaking. How dare that old tyrant dismiss on her part the very crimes for which he’d prosecuted me so severely! Had I been caught reading Dr. Herzl’s pamphlet (or even the newspaper for which he wrote!) there wouldn’t have been wives enough in Galicia with which to punish me! Now this same despot who had driven me from his garden was financing my sister’s move — in the company of unbelievers! freethinkers! Zionists! — to Palestine? It made no sense. It was one thing for me to have changed. After all, I’d been caught and captured, tried and convicted, punished and exiled, sent out of the Pale on my own, and at so very young an age, but what, I wondered, had happened to my father? With a sudden rush of memory, I recalled that it had been Sore Dvore who had found me that morning, happily smoking and reading in our Father’s gazebo, Sore Dvore who had reported my black crimes to our Mother.

“So there I was, Yankl,” she was saying, “a girl alone in Basel.”

“Yankl,” I said with a sneer. I discovered I couldn’t help regarding her now with a certain bitterness.

“But why are you laughing?”

“Oh, it’s just no one here calls me that.”

“No? And what
do
they call you?”

“Kobi.”

Sore Dvore folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. She squinted at me and pursed her lips. Her gaze seemed to weigh a thousand kilos and, beneath its derision, all my careful sartorial choices — my unkempt Bohemian hair, my dainty little goatee, my haute optique pince-nez — seemed like the crudest of masquerades.

“Kobi?”

I raised my eyebrows and nodded.

“Oh, but that just isn’t
you!”
she cried.

Of course it wasn’t me. Or at least not to Sore Dvore. Naturally, to Sore Dvore, I would only be what I had always been: a wretched little malcontented Yankl, reading his forbidden books, and smoking his forbidden tobacco out among the cherry trees.

“Fitting or not, it’s what I’m called.”

“Kobi, then, it is,” she said, sounding slightly rebuked.

“Although my fiancée occasionally calls me Kaĉjo.”

“Oh, so you have a fiancée again?”

I couldn’t help noting that a poisonous tone had crept into her voice as well. I stood and walked to the window, parted its curtains with two fingers, and looked out into the night, trying to regain my composure. Taking a breath, I turned to face her again, hoping to bestow upon her the full force of my charm.

“Zionism, eh? Palestine! Marvelous! Simply marvelous. It’s only there that a Jew can live as a man. However, did you know I’m somewhat involved in a great social movement myself?” Leaning against the wall, I crossed one ankle over the other and laced my arms across my chest. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but Sore Dvore once again seemed to be suppressing her laughter, biting into a slice of bread with a thick piece of cheese and olives on top of it, in order to conceal her grin.

“Oh?” she asked, chewing. “And what is that?”

“Esperanto.”

She shook her head.

“It’s a universal language movement.”

She brought her napkin, in an emergency, to her open mouth, and I saw that I had imagined nothing. Unable to suppress anything now, she struggled between swallowing her food and spitting it out in order not to choke, her shoulders shaking in helpless convulsions.

“Oh, Yankl!”

“Kobi!”
I corrected her, although I wished I hadn’t. Whining, I never felt more like a Yankl in my life.

“What’s the idea there? That everyone will speak — ”She laughed so hard, she nearly choked. “That everyone will speak the same language and then … ?”

“Yes, and then, slowly, over time, of course, not all at once, mankind will be reunited into one family.”

To calm herself, she’d taken a sip of coffee, but in reaction to this last, she spit the mouthful back into her cup. Particles of masticated cheese, olives, and bread floated in it like bits of fish food in an aquarium.

“Oh God, Yankl — I mean
Kobi
!” she corrected herself quickly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry!” She shook her hands out in front
of her, as though they were wet and she were trying to dry them. “I don’t mean to laugh.” But then something made her laugh even more furiously.

Finally I could take no more of it. “And now,
Sarah
,” I pronounced the name as snidely as I could, “let me ask you a question. Just what language does Dr. Herzl imagine we Jews will be speaking with one another when we all return to our newly regained homeland?”

“What language?” She laughed once more, wiping a tear away with the heel of her hand. “Why, German, of course.”

I scoffed. “Proof of the prophet’s excellence!”

“Well, certainly not Hebrew! As Dr. Herzl says in
The Jewish State:
‘Who among us can even ask for a train ticket in that strange tongue?’”

(Unuvojan bileton al Jafo, mi petas, I thought to myself unhappily.)

“Sore Dvore, let’s be honest now,” I said. “As noble as your Drs. Herzl and Nordau might be, as splendid as is their goal, do you really imagine that the attainment of universal peace and brotherhood through an international auxiliary language is any less realistic than the restoration of the Jewish homeland in ancient Palestine? I don’t mean to be cruel, but do you really suppose that a precious Viennese feuilletonist, a failed playwright, whose plays are completely tedious, by the way, your noble Dr. Herzl, for all his impressive demeanor, might in any way perform as an effective figure on the stage of world history? Only look at the facts: the Ottoman Empire would have to collapse. Our empire, God forbid, would have to collapse. The Kaiser of Germany would have to have a complete change of heart. Europe would be plunged into war. And yet somehow you think these kings and sultans will simply fall at the feet of a little Jewish journalist who spent two weeks holed up in a Paris hotel scribbling his now-famous pamphlet? No, even if you will it, it’s still a dream. And even
were
it to happen, the land isn’t
arable
! No one wants it! No one even lives on it now! Who’s going to till the soil? A bunch of soft-palmed yeshiva bukhers or neurotic salon Jews who don’t know that potatoes grow in the ground and not on vines?”

She was nearly red-faced with anger herself. “And I suppose,
Kobi
, it’s more realistic to assume that millions of people, in learning a new language, will suddenly become the best of friends?”

“Through free and open communication, yes, as Dr. Zamenhof imagines it, men of goodwill will come to see that there’s much more binding them than dividing them, and quite so.”

“Well, and the only argument against that is — ”

“Yes, Sarah, what
is
the only argument against that?” I nearly shouted at her.

“All of world history!”

Alas, for that well-phrased triumph, I lacked a retort.

“As though people who speak the same language have never for a day oppressed one another!” Though I’m sure she meant it not at all in this way, the cataclysm that was my truncated childhood suddenly entered the room. Not that Father spoke the same language as the rest of us, but very nearly, and hadn’t he oppressed us all?

(Or was it only me?)

“You’re talking about Father now, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not talking about Father, Kobi. I’m talking about you!”

“Me?”

“How could you just abandon that poor girl to her fate?”

“Ita, you mean?”

“She threw herself into the river! Must I remind you of that, Yankl? She threw herself into the river!”

“Yes? And? So?”

“Because
you
left her, Yankl! You abandoned her! On her wedding night!”

“It wasn’t because
I
left her, Sore Dvore! It was because Father forced me to marry her!”

“But she
loved
you! Anyone could see it in the way she looked at you. Even I could see it.”

“And did I love
her
, Sore Dvore? Could anyone see
that
in my face? Did anyone even bother to look into
my
face? And what about Hindele? Does it matter whom she loved?”

“You destroyed everything when you left!”

“You say that, Sore Dvore, as though it were my fault.”

“Father was never the same again!”

“Good!”

“And neither was Mama.”

“Well, for that I’m sorry. I truly am. But what was I supposed to do? Remain married to the village idiot for the rest of my life!”

“Don’t call her that!”

“It’s not my fault Mama married a madman!”

“Yankl, you made us all so very unhappy!”

“Yes, and I suppose when everyone was happy except me, unhappiness didn’t matter.”

“You should never have read those books.”

“And you should never have told them I was reading those books! Why couldn’t you just have kept your damnable mouth shut!”

“Don’t be cruel!”

“But no! You had to run through the orchards, shouting your discovery to the entire world — ‘Yankl is reading forbidden books! Yankl is smoking forbidden cigarettes and reading forbidden books!’ — so that Father had no choice but to — ”

“Yankl, I was a child!”

“Sore Dvore,
I
was a child!”

“We were children.”

“Yes, and so it made us easy prey.”

She made a small tsk-ing sound with her mouth. “You poor boy!” she said, raising her arms and offering to embrace me.

“No! Get away from me!” I heard myself shouting. “Get out! Now! Please! Leave me!”

After a moment of silence, she began bundling her things.

“Well,” she sighed, standing with her suitcase at the door. “I’ll leave you then.”

“Good!”

“Please, Yankl.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll give your love to Uncle Moritz and Aunt Fania then,” she said.

“I’ll see to it myself.”

“Yankl …”

God damn you! God damn you! God damn you! I wanted to cry, but
instead I said, “Ah, forgive me, dear Sarah. I’m so very sorry I shouted at you. I’m afraid it’s been a rather trying day.” Apologizing again, I picked up her suitcase and offered to accompany her to the station, which I did. I even waited until her train left, waving as it pulled out.

And we never saw each other again.

CHAPTER 7

It wasn’t only Szibotya, of course. The entire world was changing and at a dizzying rate. The quarter century preceding my birth had witnessed a bumper crop of innovations: the sewing machine, the gyroscope, the glider. Trains suddenly had sleeping cars. Your neighbor suddenly owned a washing machine, a bicycle, and perhaps even a typewriter. Thanks to the internal combustion engine, automobiles now ruled the road. Strange lights controlled the flow of traffic. Elevators took you to the tops of impossibly high buildings made of steel, and an arsenal of new weaponry — the machine gun, the torpedo, dynamite, barbed wire — made the too-terrifying art of war obsolete.

However, all this was nothing in comparison to what followed: the phonograph, the lightbulb, the player piano, the dishwasher, the gramophone, the motor-driven vacuum cleaner. Cinemas, motorcycles, cash registers, fountain pens, seismographs, metal detectors, steam turbines, radar, toilet paper, rolled photographic film, pneumatic tires, Cordite matchbooks, escalators, diesel engines, a veritable tower of innovation and ingenuity at the summit of which stood the triumphal figure of man. When the World’s Fair opened in Paris in 1900, its grand boulevards and its broad pavilions, its elevated trains and its moving sidewalks, its Ferris wheel and its Eiffel Tower (lit to heaven with garish electrical lights) announced to the world one thing: the future was no longer a thing of the past! It had arrived, it was here! And we were living in it!

Everything that could be dreamt could be built — and what couldn’t be dreamt? — including an international auxiliary language!

It was thanks, principally, to the Marquis de Beaufront, the French aristocrat Dr. Zamenhof had mentioned to me, that Esperanto had not sputtered out in Russia. No, having carried the dying torch to Paris, the marquis illuminated the entire world from there. Esperanto societies now spanned the globe. Hundreds of Esperanto magazines had sprouted
up, and somehow Dr. Zamenhof had even found the funds to publish the
Universala Vortaro
, a universal dictionary, with three thousand root words translated into French, English, German, Polish, and Russian.

(Fraŭlino Bernfeld undertook the Herculean task of compiling the Dutch-Esperanto entries, and we spent many long nights working head to head on an enormous card catalog of her own devising.)