A Curable Romantic (88 page)

“Spoken like a true amateur!”

“A man can destroy in a morning what has taken centuries to build: cities, civilizations, cultures.”

“These arguments are so tedious!”

“Certainly, there’s more good than evil in the world — otherwise nothing could endure — but it’s only a little more, a fraction at best, if even that.”

“And Esperanto?” I said, suddenly fearing I understood him too well. “How did Esperanto fit into this balance?”

“Oh, well, that’s just it, you see,”
said unhappily.

wagged his thick finger at me. “That Dr. Zamenhof of yours got just a little too close for comfort, I must say. One really can’t force the hand of the Messiah, Dr. Sammelsohn. Everyone knows this.”

“What … what are you saying?” I sputtered. “That Ita, working on behalf of Heaven, intentionally destroyed the Esperanto movement in order to … to … to what? … to delay the coming of the Messiah?”

“Oh, no, not at all! Not at all!”
said, but then he immediately corrected himself: “Well, actually, I suppose that’s exactly it.”

“We couldn’t rely on Professor Couturat to do the job alone, although, as it turned out, he succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

“But-but-but,” I stammered, “why on earth would Heaven wish to delay the coming of the Messiah?”

“Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, don’t ask us that please,”
said.

“We don’t make the rules.”

“No, we simply carry them out.”

“In other words,”
said in German, giving his brother an amused look and straining to finish his sentence before laughter choked it off, “we were only following orders!”

(For reasons I wouldn’t understand for many years,
and
burst out laughing, after which
drying his eyes on his sleeve, said,
was right. All the emotions in a human body! Whoever thought it!”)

“But it wasn’t only
on that Parisian street,”
told me.

“Or didn’t you recognize Zusha the Amalekite?”

“In the guise of Master Gajewski!”

“And your own father!”

“In the guise of the dog.”

“A new entry for Dr. Freud’s chart!”

“Which, thank Heaven, he burned.”

I stared at the two of them, the German officer and the Jewish professor. No, it’s definitive, I thought. I’m definitely hallucinating.

“We never denied it, we never denied that,”
said.

“That snarling wolfhound was my father?”

They both affirmed this terrible fact with a shrug.

“But I didn’t even pet him!” I exclaimed, feeling suddenly very glum.