A Curable Romantic (67 page)

“They’ll have them there, I suppose.”

Apparently, however, Christians pray without the need of special garments. This was our first surprise upon entering the cathedral in the fortified old city. The second came when a man, the priest, ran up to us as we entered the narthex, his mouth bent down so violently at the corners, it resembled one of the circumflex accents Dr. Javal so worried about.

“Your hats, gentlemen, your hats! Show some respect, please! You’re in the house of the Lord.”

“But … but we have no other head covering,” Dr. Zamenhof explained, whispering with an air of profound embarrassment.

“Off! Off!” the priest said, snapping his fingers. Meekly, we removed our hats. I’d never been in a church before and, of course, neither had Dr. Zamenhof. As we walked in and looked for seats, I tried to take in the sights without appearing like a novice. There were icons, paintings, figurines, statuary tacked up in every niche and on every spare inch of every wall. There were half a dozen confessionals — these reminded me of changing rooms on a beach, though built more solidly — and an odd statue of the Virgin Mother and her infant son inside a boat. The place looked like a cluttered secondhand shop, visually noisy, if not cacophonous. A small girl in a blue dress approached Dr. Zamenhof as we settled into our pew. Go away! Go away! I thought, wanting to fade anonymously into the crowd. I could sense the eyes of the entire congregation upon us, watching with interest our little dumb show. My thoughts, however, and the pleading scowl they no doubt produced on my face, had no effect upon the child as she thrust a small book at the good and now-famous Dr. Esperanto.

“Sir, may I have your autograph, please?” she inquired sweetly.

“Not here,” Dr. Zamenhof whispered kindly in her ear. “This place is a sacred place.”

He arranged to meet with her outside after the service.

“But they write on their Sabbaths,” I whispered, leaning in to him.

His features became fixed in a look of momentary perplexity.

“What?” he whispered back, eying me above the rims of his spectacles.

“I said that, unlike us — although not unlike you and me — they write during their Sabbaths.”

“Ah, yes, so they do, so they do. Of course,” he said, clucking his tongue. He twisted his neck, looking into the church behind us. “I suppose it’s too late to call her back.”

“Yes!” I said quietly, as the priest was walking towards us again. What have we done now? What have we done now? I thought, but thankfully, he moved past us and ascended the apse.

ON MONDAY AT
10 a.m. sharp, the first of the general meetings commenced, and the hard work of organizing an international movement
began. Citing fatigue, Dr. Zamenhof turned the proceedings over to Rector Boirac as the de facto president of the congress. Firmly, but with his usual tact, Rector Boirac opened the first meeting with a discussion of Dr. Zamenhof’s
Declaration of the Essentials of Esperantism
, in which our Majstro laid out, in his usual clear and concise fashion, the tenets of our movement. A fundamento was established — though a liberal one, consisting of nothing more than Dr. Zamenhof’s Sixteen Rules of Grammar, the eighteen-hundred-word
Universala Vortaro
, and the practical
Ekzecaro
, or exercise book — and from this, it was declared, no one could deviate while still calling himself an Esperantist. (These texts, down to their typos, so the joke went, were to be sacrosanct.) Any other ideas or hopes linked to Esperanto by its proponents were each man’s private affair, for which Esperanto could not be held responsible.

This became known as the Boulogne Declaration.

Later in the week, an official language committee was proposed and voted in. There was a great deal of resistance to an international organization, however, and Dr. Zamenhof’s long-cherished hope of founding a league of Esperantists was roundly defeated.

“It’s impossible, I suppose, to rule a group of individualists and eccentrics,” fraŭlino Bernfeld whispered to me, as we sat in on the proceedings. As always, she was correct: how
does
one organize a bevy of mavericks, visionaries, oddballs, loners, and utopianists? The question was even more thorny since the French had joined the fray: children of the 1870s, they’d all been schooled in the rampant individualism characteristic of their age. Still, I confess, the issues under discussion impressed me less than did the fragrance of fraŭlino Bernfeld’s perfume and the slightly wet feeling of her skin. (Though by the sea, the days at Boulogne, by noon, grew quite hot.) The two of us found every opportunity, every opening in the official schedule, to casually wander away from each other, strolling with apparent aimlessness, often in opposite directions, so that as we arrived at her suite or at my room no one might come to know of the hours we spent together in bed, refining and perfecting the activities we’d discovered a mutual interest in that night upon the beach.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s bed became a garden of delights, a haven of long, languid afternoons with the cool sea light frizzling in through the gauze of
her drawn curtains. Focusing our attentions exclusively upon each other, we were only dimly aware of the shadows that fell across us, crossing the bed and the floor, climbing the wall, circumnavigating the room like the gnomon of a sundial, as days passed in this fashion. While others’ often booming voices filtered through the open window from the square below, we spoke only in whispers and half phrases. Everything was succulent and wet. Beads of perspiration fell from my nose onto fraŭlino Bernfeld’s breast beneath me. The valley of her neck, where I planted my kisses, was slick. Our arms were slathered, our hair moist and dripping. As the hours ran down and the time for emerging again into the congress drew near, we finished our slow, bleary, convulsive lovemaking with climaxes that were but anticlimaxes, so rich and deliriant had been everything preceding them. Indeed, there was something disappointing about finally uncoiling the tensed spirals of the kundalinic snakes curling deep inside our groins, as doing so meant a cessation of the forever forward motion of unconcluded desire. Afterwards, we bathed, like children, in the tub, fraŭlino Bernfeld sitting and I lying with my legs around her hips, or I sitting and she holding me in the brace of her long, smooth legs.

Much, of course, had been said throughout the congress on the now-proven utility of Esperanto. The language was flexible, pliant enough for every use from casual conversation to the ordering of a drink in a bar; one could give a speech in it or run a meeting with it or employ it in the highest of literary endeavors. I can attest, however, as could fraŭlino Bernfeld, that the international language is suited, as well, for the manifold uses of love. As we had, in Berlin before boarding the train to Paris, agreed henceforth to speak only in the international tongue with each other, we made no exceptions, whispering words of passion, in the exquisite privacy of our bedchambers:

“Via buŝo je la ektuŝo donacas tute jam sian molecon de veluro!”

“Ho! Mia amanto, mi ludos viran rolon kun plezuro, rajdonte vin kun arta kokso-lulo!”

“Dum inter viajn du fermurojn, mia kara, premiĝos mia kapo kaj mia lango vibros kun fervoro!”

Sed, sufiĉe, leganto, mi estas maldiskreta kaj ĉi tiuj aĵoj estas neniom da via afero, vere!

Exhausted and enthralled, by the last hours of the congress, I felt drained, emptied, tapped, but deliriously happy. My lower limbs were as rubbery as a trio of garden hoses, and it was soon sufficient to merely see fraŭlino Loë or to fall asleep near her in the afternoon or to catch sight of her talking, across the room, in a passionate debate. I had, I thought, no further need to touch her or to kiss her or to stroke her so that the sweet waters of her desire welled up for me, until in fact, I did touch her or kiss her or stroke her, and then I was on fire for her again. In public, we made our plans and parted as abruptly, as coolly as possible, meeting at her door or at mine or, as our desire grew too insistent, in the servants’ stairwell or in the laundry room, bribing this laundry maid or that steward to lock the door and look the other way, so that, at the last moment of the congress, after the group of delegates had been photographed in impressive rows upon the hotel lawn, when every man threw his hat into the air and, with a crying hullabaloo, shouted out, Vivu Esperanto! Vivu Zamenhof! Vivu Michaux! I, standing among them, added my own vivuojn — Vivu fraŭlino Loë! Vivu Amo! Vivu Sekso! — before searching with the other men among the earth-downed hats for my cherished square-crowned derby.

THINGS COULD NOT
have been more different than they had been the last time the five of us stood together in Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten station. As fraŭlino Loë and I took leave of the Zamenhofs, seeing them to their rightful train, I took a moment to reflect. Though only one month had passed, our lives had all changed radically. fraŭlino Bernfeld and I were no longer bitter opponents, as we had been when we were last here. Esperanto, once the strange hobby of an odd fifteen-year-old boy, was, if not completely established, known beyond the circle of its adherents and well on its way to transforming the world. Dr. Zamenhof was world-famous. He should have been pleased, but no, he was restless instead.

He’d realized, he told me as I escorted him between trains, that although a universal auxiliary language might ameliorate differences in speech and nationality, differences in creed remained a sticking point. “Hasn’t this been made abundantly clear by the French Esperantists’ refusal to allow me to recite the final stanza of my prayer?”

He was right, I supposed. If most of humanity, worshipping the same God, felt free to oppress and even kill those who offered their praises to that God in an insignificantly different manner, would a common language really pour a cooling water over their raging tempers? Would it do anything other than allow one man’s murderer to explain to him, clearly and fluently, the precise theological reasons for which he was being murdered?

“No, clearly something more is needed,” Dr. Zamenhof said, and with a certain modest pride, he revealed to me that, one night at the congress, unable to sleep, he had locked himself inside the sitting room of his suite. Dressed in his pajamas and night robe, pounding away at the typewriter he’d borrowed from the concierge, he’d composed a new pamphlet. Buoyed, no doubt, by the sheer giddy, ridiculous successes of the First Universal Congress occurring all around him, he’d invented a new scheme to further redeem humanity from the dark night of its eternal slumbers. People would scoff, he knew; they’d throw that old quotation of Kant’s at him — that nothing straight was ever built from the crooked timber of humanity — but what did he care? “If eighteen years ago, I’d listened to these scoffers, why, I’d’ve never published my grammar, and eighteen years later, I wouldn’t have been standing in front of nearly a thousand Esperantists!”

Indeed, the language he’d authored as a “mad” boy in Białystok was now being considered for inclusion in the curricula of all French schools by the French ministers of justice and education!

And so that night, in a burst of electric white heat, he had created Hillelism, or — more properly, in Esperanto — Hilelismo, named after Hillel, the first-century Galilian rabbi who’d been Jesus’s teacher, one of whose guiding principles was “Do not do unto others that which is hateful unto you.”

“Just as Esperanto is a neutral universal auxiliary language,” Dr. Zamenhof explained to me, “so Hilelismo will be a neutral universal auxiliary religion!” He ducked his head. “Say what you will, call me a naïve dreamer, but that morning, as I lay my head upon my arms at the desk in my hotel suite and fell asleep, I dreamt of Hillelist temples, exalted palaces of music and light, erected in every city in the world — cities
renamed according to Hillelist-Esperantan principle: Berlino, Nov-Jorko, Jerusalemo — where Hileluloj from different lands were gathering to practice a general religion for all of mankind, one that was emptied of superstition, meaningless ritual, and hate-filled dogma. Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, in my dream, I stood in one of those green-domed temples — yes, I did! — and I listened to a mighty orator intoning (in Esperanto, of course, so that everyone might understand) the words of all the holy teachers of mankind — Moseo, Jesuo, Mohamedo kaj Budho. And there were angelic choirs singing hymns based upon the psalms, but with all the violent and ethnocentric parts excised. Impossible?”

“Who can say?” I said, laughing.

“Why, five years ago,” Dr. Zamenhof went on, “Boulogne would have seemed equally impossible, a mad dream, and yet we dreamt it, and — now, look! — it’s real.”

He kissed me and fraŭlino Bernfeld good-bye, and he boarded the train, helping Klara and Lidja inside. When he turned back to us, he said, “I feel so restless.” He rubbed his hands together excitedly. “There’s just so much to do!”

FRAŬLINO LOË PROVED
equally restless.

Foolishly I’d imagined our engagement would distract her from her desire to be married, that an engagement, like a new toy for a child, would be sufficiently interesting in itself. This wasn’t the case. On the contrary, the engagement proved a thing of no value. It was like a pair of trousers delivered by the tailor before the rest of the ensemble: there’s nothing one can do with it but lay it aside and wait for the jacket and vest to arrive. I couldn’t even distract fraŭlino Loë’s attention with the purchasing of rings, as her father, following Dr. Freud’s instruction not to stand in our way, had given her her mother’s band to use. A furious impatience seemed to propel fraŭlino Loë. If I had a heller for every time she said, “Darling, please, don’t you agree it’s time we set a date,” I’d have had no need of a dowry.

As for me, it’s no exaggeration to suggest that the prospect of a wedding filled me with terror. I tried to explain this reaction to myself by using Dr. Freud’s new methods of self-inquiry. Given my history, it was
clear that a wedding, specifically my own, should be a source of anxiety. After all, when had I not been emotionally brutalized at a wedding?