A Curable Romantic (55 page)

He didn’t greet us. Instead, casting a fearful look over his shoulder, he corralled us into the whirlwind of his activity, imploring us to
off the street and through the squalid courtyard, into the precincts of his slightly less squalid home.

“No one here knows of my work in the greater world,” he explained to us, his voice tight, as though there might be spies hidden in the barrels
inside the courtyard, “and it’s just as well. No one wants a utopian crank as a doctor.” He muttered this last in Esperanto, leaving the porter, who’d been following our conversation in Yiddish, gawking.

“Klara!” he called to this wife. “Say hello to our guests! They’re special people. Introduce yourselves, everybody. Oh, and kisses all around!” He backed through the door, his arms raised, his hands opened, his fingers flicking, as though the kisses he metaphorically tossed out were hard candies. His figure darkened the doorway for an instant, and he was gone. I watched him through the window, a moment later, dashing across the courtyard below, avoiding the barrels and the goat, and disappearing at last through the inner door of his clinic.

Flummoxed into speechlessness, Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I turned to greet Dr. Zamenhof’s wife. As small and as child-like as her husband, Klara Zamenhof stood in the kitchen wringing her hands. “I- I- I …” she stammered, her unhandsome face convulsing into the most womanly of tears. “I don’t know what to say. Dr. Zamenhof is … my husband has been … well, he’s simply not …” She collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, and Fraŭlino Bernfeld was immediately at her side. She nodded to me, indicating that I should see to the porter, who needn’t witness such an intimate scene.

I said, slipping the man a ruble or two. “And no need to mention any of this to anyone …”

he said.

“I’M LOË BERNFELD,”
fraŭlino Bernfeld said, “a friend and an admirer of your husband; and this is Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a friend and admirer of … well, I suppose of mine.” She said this last playfully. Avoiding my eye, Sinjorino Zamenhof nodded towards me in welcome.

“Is there sugar?” Fraŭlino Bernfeld asked her gently.

Sinjorino Zamenhof again nodded her head.

“And cream?”

Wordlessly, she pointed towards various of her cupboards.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, please sit with us!” Fraŭlino Bernfeld said.

“Jes, miafraŭino,” I said, and I sat, fearful that my least movement or my most casual word might send the sinjorino into another paroxysm of
tears. Clutching the sugar, the milk, the cups, and the saucers all against her chest, Fraŭlino Bernfeld brought everything to the table and dispensed three cups of spicy Russian chai from the samovar.

“Dr. Zamenhof isn’t well, you say?”

“Oh, Fraŭlino Bernfeld!” Sinjorino Zamenhof said. “I can’t tell you, I simply can’t …” With that, her shrieking began anew, each hand worrying the other, as though trying to tear its twin to bits. As her wailing once again subsided, the realization seemed to descend upon each of us that we were, in fact, strangers to one another. An embarrassed silence overtook us, a silence filled only with the scrapes of cups on saucers and the sounds of needlessly cleared throats. I busied myself with my tea, hoping, in the meantime, that someone other than me might find something pertinent to say.

“Oh God!” Sinjorino Zamenhof moaned, once again tearing at her hair. With a gentle authority, Fraŭlino Bernfeld took hold of her hands. As though speaking to a serious-minded child whose day had been ruined by the pranks of a naughty sibling, she urged Sinjorino Zamenhof to unburden herself and to tell her everything. Though considerably younger, Fraŭlino Bernfeld was the taller of the two, and as Sinjorino Zamenhof began to unleash her lamentation, she so resembled a child, I half-expected her to climb into Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s lap.

“Oh, they’ve been bad enough,” she said, “these years in Warsaw, an absolute horror, you’ve no idea! No specialist ever practiced in this neighborhood before, and my husband treats factorymen, seamstresses, laborers for forty kopecks a visit! Forty kopecks a visit, seeing thirty or forty patients a day!”

“That’s fairly excessive,” I told Fraŭlino Bernfeld.

I myself saw no more than twelve.

“And from those who can’t give forty, he takes twenty; and when twenty is impossible, why, he gives the medicine away! What else is he to do? Turn people away?” Her father, who had always supported Lutek’s work, she told us, was now giving them a monthly stipend. “A terrible humiliation!” And yet what were they to do? They couldn’t refuse it. “My husband’s nerves are wrecked, and his body won’t long endure the strain. He’s on his feet all day and up all night at his typewriter! Why,
he’s even hallucinating,” she whispered, “and that’s not to mention the worry over his own father.” It seemed that Dr. Zamenhof’s father had lost a coveted position as a government censor, having been accused of letting a passage injurious to the tsar slip through in some publication or other. “But this is ridiculous!” Sinjorino Zamenhof wailed. “The article was nothing but a warning against intemperance!” Still, the old man had an enemy, a certain Zusmen, a drunkard himself and a baptized Jew. Zusmen had hated Markus Zamenhof forever without end, amen, and it was he who plotted the affair, and now it was all they could do to salvage the old man’s teaching post. “That alone cost us five thousand rubles in bribes,” the second half of her dowry, the first having long ago disappeared in printers’ costs. “No one wants a doctor who devotes his every spare moment to humanity! If my husband drank like Zusmen, may his name be blotted out, or played cards like the other specialists, why, he’d be booked with patients, and patients who can pay! But no, instead, every night — oh, every night! — he’s up till all hours, rattling away on his typewriter, corresponding with colleagues and collaborators over this or that linguistic question. It’s all maddening! And now there’s all this trouble because of Count Tolstoy!”

“Count Leo Tolstoy?” I said.

“Mm.” Sinjorino Zamenhof nodded.

She considered her tea before pushing it away.

ASKED BY THE
journal
Posrednik
to give his opinion on Esperanto, Count Tolstoy had responded that learning Esperanto was an appropriately Christian activity, as it promoted understanding between peoples. Dr. Zamenhof quoted Tolstoy’s remarks in his own journal
La Esperantisto
, and the two men began a correspondence that led to the publication in Esperanto of Tolstoy’s famous letter, “On Reason and Belief,” a work considered subversive by the tsar. As a consequence,
La Esperantisto
was suppressed, and Dr. Zamenhof’s attempts to continue sending the gazette to subscribers in plain, brown envelopes brought the authorities down even more furiously upon his head. The magazine was banned, and Dr. Zamenhof lost all contact with the Russian Esperantistoj, nearly sixty percent of his following.

“And so we’re doomed!” Sinjorino Zamenhof cried. “Doomed!”

To keep her husband’s spirits up, she’d made him a little sign, which she’d posted on his typewriter, an ugly old black Blikensdorfer, that read
NI LABORU KAJ ESPERU!
(
Let us work and hope!
), but both of these were becoming harder every day.

“Oh, how difficult, how truly difficult,” Fraŭlino Bernfeld said, “to do the good and to be so good.” She cradled Sinjorino Zamenhof’s head against the soft pillows of her bosom and kissed her forehead as tenderly as a mother might a child’s.

“Ne, ne.” Sinjorino Zamenhof resisted the praise, it seemed, by habit. She began to pull away but was clearly exhausted, and Fraŭlino Bern-feld’s greater strength prevailed.

fraŭlino Bernfeld said.
Ssh, ssh, sleep a little here with me.

In response to this gentle command, spoken not in the language of a new and braver world, but in the old and fearful one of our childhoods, Klara Zamenhof did exactly that: she slept. Looking over Sinjorino Zamenhof’s shoulder at me, fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled the corners of her mouth down in a comical expression of happy disbelief, as though we were the parents of a rambunctious child we thought we’d never get to sleep.

As Sinjorino Zamenhof snored, her nose cushioned against fraŭlino Bernfeld’s breast, I took a moment to study her face. Unlike her husband’s, all ovals and rings, hers was composed principally of vertical lines. The nose was long and sloped, and the chin so pointed, in profile it resembled the tip of a slender moon.

“Ho, Klara dormas, ŭu ne? Bone, bonege,” Dr. Zamenhof said, having climbed up from his clinic via an interior staircase. He seated himself at the table, surveying the odd scene — the unexplained presence of fraŭlino Bernfeld and me, his wife slumbering on a strange woman’s breast. He picked up Klara’s teacup and, tilting it towards himself, swirled it, as though trying to reanimate its contents. Bringing it to his lips, he sniffed it before deciding against taking a sip. Beneath the weight of Dr. Zamenhof’s slumbering wife, fraŭlino Bernfeld pointed with her chin towards the samovar.

“Tason da teo, Majstro?”

“Ne, ne,” he said, refusing her offer of tea.

He lifted his hands vertically, palms faceward, and rubbed his eyes, forcing his glasses onto the dome of his head where they remained even after he’d lowered his hands. “I was sleeping as well. Astonishing!” he said. “No, I fell asleep right on my feet, standing in my consultation room. I started to dream. I was in Veisiejai again, still so hopeful and …” He scowled at something neither fraŭlino Bernfeld nor I could see.