A Curable Romantic (53 page)

A servant of the club addressed me: “This way, sir.” Like the cloak steward, he too wore a splashy uniform — a taupe jacket with large brass buttons, militaristic epaulets, and a diagonal sash of deepest purple. On each pant leg was a raised satin band. This is the costume of servitude, I told myself, and yet I couldn’t help feeling that my worsted suit suffered in comparison. I tried in vain not to gawk at the high ceilings and the murals and the domed skylights above me as the steward, inured to such splendor, led me into one well-lit sitting room after the next. Equally in vain were my attempts not to nod at the gentlemen who sat in their over-stuffed chairs, breaking off from their cigars and their newspapers and their business deals to watch, in silence, as I was escorted past them. The steward slowed his pace before two large oaken doors and leaned his ear against the wood, rapping lightly. I heard no reply, but the boy nodded, as though confirming for himself the sound of an answering command. He opened the door and, standing beside it, ushered me through.

The first thing I noticed was the large fireplace recessed into the room’s high wall. It was nearly six feet tall and eight feet long, and the roaring flames were so loud I was uncertain I’d actually heard Herr Bernfeld’s voice rising above them in greeting. He was seated at his desk in a sumptuous robe of blue brocade and matching velvet slippers. Outside the tall windows, the whitened city looked like a dreamscape dreamt by this regal man, this sultan sitting in the Saharan warmth of his own private chambers. Without acknowledging me, he continued signing checks inside the pages of a thick leather exchequer.

“Sit down, I said. Please.”

So, he had addressed me after all.

“There.” He nodded towards a well-polished table in another part of the room. I did as I was commanded, thinking first to sit with my back to him, then taking the chair opposite, so that I might watch him at his work, regretting, of course, the little hop-hop movement I’d made switching from chair to chair. Though Herr Bernfeld never raised an eye from his exchequer, I was certain he had nevertheless seen my embarrassing indecisiveness.

He was a tall man with a full head of black hair and a high, wide forehead. His rectangular beard fell nearly a foot and a half beneath his chin. His nose, straight as a letter opener, was perfectly equidistant between the southern tip of his beard and the northern pole of his widow’s peak. The tight curls of his hair were so dark and lustrous, they nearly gleamed beneath the nimbus of the electric lamps. I’d never seen a man as virile nor as handsome among our people. He raised himself from his desk, and although his chest was narrow — he seemed constructed entirely out of rectangles — his waist was narrower still. Squinting myopically, he nodded in my direction and, though I nodded in return, a moment after doing so, I realized my mistake. He hadn’t nodded at me, but past me, at the steward who was placing a silver coffeepot upon the table.

“Danke, Werner.” Herr Bernfeld remained standing as the young man set the table. As though propelled by a will greater than my own, I rose from the chair and stood as well. Only when Werner had finished did Herr Bernfeld condescend to sit, looking up at me quizzically, as though my inexplicable standing were a puzzle.

Not a single word passed between us as I skulked, like a disobedient dog, back into my chair, slouching, then thinking not to slouch, then slouching out of nervous fatigue. Herr Bernfeld squinted at me, as though not quite certain he was seeing some amusing detail. He reached into the breast pocket of his gown and, with two long fingers, drew out a monocle at the end of a glittering chain. Placing it like a communion wafer inside his mouth, he sighed and befogged the glass on either side. Removing a silk monogrammed kerchief from his sleeve, he rubbed the lens between its folds before dexterously screwing the monocle into place. Half his vision thus improved, he looked at me again, having apparently confirmed with his half-naked eyes the presence of whatever amusing thing he’d previously seen.

“Allow me to pour,” he said, reaching for the coffeepot and quickly filling our cups. “I won’t waste any more of your time, Dr. Sammelsohn. It has been made known to me that you and my daughter have conceived a sentimental regard for each other, a circumstance that you are no doubt astute enough to know greatly displeases me. My daughter is my only child and the child of my late wife, whom I loved deeply. I had already, I thought with my daughter’s consent, arranged a suitable match for her with a man her social equal, a match that, until you arrived upon the scene, she showed no signs of rejecting. And yet, now, here you are, the rude fact of you, sitting across from me, listening to me insult you, too convinced of the rightness of what I’m saying to even contradict me.”

I tried to drink my coffee, but my hand was quaking too violently, and I returned the cup to its coffee-splattered saucer.

“Whether I am unworthy of your daughter’s love, my good Herr Bernfeld, I cannot say. All I know is that I love your daughter very much, and against all odds, she seems to love me as well.”

“If you truly loved her, Dr. Sammelsohn, as you claim, and if, additionally, you were a man of substance, you would, for her sake, renounce that love.”

“If I were I a man of substance?” I returned. “How am I not a man of substance?”

Herr Bernfeld smiled at the simplicity of my question and answered me as one might a simpleton: “Why, just look at yourself!”

Indeed, so imperious was his command that I did exactly as he bid me. I lowered my chin and took a long look at myself or as much of myself as I could see from this vantage: my chest down to my feet, roughly the whole of myself minus my head and neck. From this view, it wasn’t clear how I differed so radically from the statistical norm. I raised my eye and met Herr Bernfeld’s monocled gaze. Though neither of us spoke it aloud, the word
idiot
seemed to hover in the atmosphere between us.

“Your daughter, Herr Bernfeld, if I may say so, is the most idealistic person I’ve ever known. Her belief in the goodness of mankind has completely transformed me.”

“Every person is idealistic in his youth, Dr. Sammelsohn, just as everyone in his infancy cannot control his bowels. My apologies. I see by the look on your face that my analogy disgusts you.”

I shrugged, not knowing where to look.

“Listen to me, Dr. Sammelsohn. The world is not intended to be a paradise, and all of us must eventually be expelled from whatever Edens we might cling to. When you have lived as long as I, you’ll find that innocence has a way of calling forth its own traducing.”

“Were you never an idealist yourself, sir?”

“I was. Indeed, I was quite the romantic. A man would have to be heartless not to be, and a fool not to outgrow it. Of course, every Jew wishes to summon the Messiah, to draw him down, through the force of his own goodness, from the throne upon which he sits chained in the Heavens. But one might profitably ask: Who has chained him there, if not the Lord Himself, the devil being a theological convenience we Jews, in our purest theologies, though not in the way you yourself were raised, forbid ourselves? And who has ever gone against God and won? Only ask yourself that. In the meantime, there’s actual work to be done. As Ben Zakkai teaches us in our holy books: ‘If you’re planting a tree and the Messiah arrives, finish planting the tree, then go and greet the Messiah.’”

“But, my good sir, isn’t that exactly what Dr. Zamenhof is doing, with the help of your daughter? Planting trees for our future?”

“Yes, I know of your Dr. Zamenhof. Much of my money has gone into sustaining his utopian schemes. He’d like to turn the entire world into Jews.”

“Into Jews?”

“Certainly! Just as we possess a despised and ridiculed jargon that allows us to communicate with ourselves, as one family, across national borders, so, if Dr. Zamenhof has his way, will the entire world soon possess such a jargon. In this way, he believes he can smuggle our people into the great family of man while no one is paying attention. But, you see, there’s one problem.”

“And what is that?”

“They don’t want us in their family.”

They don’t want us in their family.
These words resounded for me in a thousand different ways. Herr Bernfeld didn’t want me in his family, neither apparently did my own father, just as the world wanted nothing to do with any of us.

“With all due respect,” I said as politely as I could, “it is to be hoped that through the work of people like Dr. Zamenhof and, to a significant degree, your daughter, this deplorable state will be revised.”

“And then all men will be brothers, or something like that?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re familiar with the Bible, I presume, a man like yourself.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve read deeply into the genesis of mankind.”

“Naturally.”

“You’ve been immersed by your teachers in all the commentaries; you’ve turned the text inside and out and have examined it from a thousand different angles.”

“It was the way I was raised, yes, of course.”

“Then tell me, my dear young fellow, how many brothers did the earth require before one murdered the other?”

I could say nothing.

“Precisely,” he said, having won the point.

“But certainly …” I deferentially gestured for permission to rebut him.

He nodded. “By all means, please go ahead; speak.”

“Certainly in the five thousand years separating the murder of Abel from our own present moment, mankind has progressed, if not a little.

Besides, with Esperanto, we’re not talking about some great altruistic sacrifice, but about a thing that is universally good for everyone. As Dr. Zamenhof clearly points out: since it’s universally recognized that an international language is not only possible but that it would bring only good to mankind, if we didn’t rise to the occasion, why then, as a race, we’d have to deny to ourselves even the smallest bit of elementary intelligence.”

“Which I’m fully prepared to do.”

“Surely you don’t mean that, sir.”

“You can’t change the nature of man, Dr. Sammelsohn. The wicked will always destroy the naïve and the meek. Why? I don’t know why. Perhaps it gives them pleasure. The Tower of Babel will always crumble beneath the weight of its many builders. But those of us who, like myself, accept the world as it is, who accept people as they are, who don’t wish to reform anyone from his warring ways, can make a handsome profit from this eternal warring and, with that profit, build schools, fund hospitals, endow laboratories, plant a few trees, as you say, while fools like you go rushing off to greet the Messiah.”

“Surely, you don’t include your daughter among that list of fools?”

Herr Bernfeld leaned in towards me. “Let me tell you something about my daughter, Dr. Sammelsohn, shall I? Every day for eight months when she was nine years old, she begged me for a certain locket. We used to see it in the front window of a jewelry shop we passed on the Prinsengracht each morning as I walked her to school. It wasn’t very expensive, but it was too expensive for a nine-year-old child. However, after eight months of her haranguing me, against the advice of my wife, I relented and bought Loë this necklace. She wore it straight through for three weeks, and after that, we never saw it again. ‘And where’s your pretty golden locket?’ I said to her one day. ‘Oh, Papa, I tired of it,’ she told me. ‘So I threw it in the canal, and now I want a horse.’”

He tossed his head back and roared with laughter, his mouth opened so wide, I could see all his bright and sparkling teeth. He caught his breath and unscrewed his monocle and wiped away the tear that had formed in his eye.

“‘Oh, Papa, I tired of it, and so I threw it in the canal, and now I want a horse!’”

He laughed again, patting me sympathetically on the arm. “Would you care for a bite of breakfast with your coffee?”

“Thank you, no.” I shook my head.

“Bread and jam?”

“No.”

“An omelet? The chef here is excellent.”

“No, thank you.”

“A bowl of groats?”

I shook my head again.

“Well,” he sipped his coffee, “and now I suppose you’re wondering what I plan to do about this regrettable state of affairs, and the answer to that question may surprise you.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing,” Herr Bernfeld said, as though he were a chess champion explaining an unbeatable move to his opponent.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.” Though his beard was as thick as a mink’s carcass, I had the impression he was grinning behind it from ear to ear. “I can’t afford to estrange myself from the affections of my only child. She’s too precious to me for that. I am, however, though I have loved but one woman in my life, no stranger to the ways of women. This” — he raised his nose, as though the word were repugnant to him — “romance of yours is entirely mismatched, it suits neither of you, it will not last, nor will it culminate in a marriage. Rather, it will crumble under its own weight. Exactly like that nonsensical language you promote. Of that I have no doubt, nor does a specialist I’ve consulted in the matter.”

“A specialist?”

“A neurologist I see from time to time,” he lightly brushed off the issue.

“May I inquire into his name?”

“Of course, although it’s of no moment in our discussion: his name is Sigmund Freud.”

“Ah.”

“You know him, I believe.”

“Yes, too well, I sometimes think.”

“Yes. He said as much.”

“Or perhaps not well enough.”

“However, his professional opinion is in complete agreement with mine. Sooner, it is to be hoped, rather than later, but ineluctably, your friendship with my daughter, built upon so faulty a foundation, will crumble. And I ask myself, if this is so, as I and Dr. Freud believe, why, Dr. Sammelsohn, should I take a stand against you, intervening in a domineering and unattractive way, and thus jeopardizing the only thing that matters to me — the love of my daughter — when personal history, character, her character specifically, but yours also, will eventually do the work of a thousand chaperones?”

“And if it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined?”