A Curable Romantic (59 page)

All across Europe, high-minded people had begun gathering for congresses, and Esperanto was no exception. In 1904, 180 Esperantists had met in Calais, and the event had proven such a success that la Société pour la propagation de l’espéranto proposed a larger congress in France for the following year.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I were of course excited by the news, although we’d heard via post that Dr. Zamenhof would be unable to attend. Money was a problem, as well as his increasingly frail health. But these were the least of it. As unfathomable as it might seem, at age forty-five, Dr. Zamenhof had been drafted into the Russian army to serve as an oculist in Manchuria! Worse — as Klara wrote us, clearly in distress — he was insisting upon going! At the urging of his friends however, he was made to see the light. His heart, never strong, could never have sustained the rigors of army life. And indeed, not only was he granted a medical exemption, but his doctor ordered him into the hospital for an immediate week of rest.

When the news went forth that the Majstro would be attending la Unua Universala Kongreso, fraŭlino Bernfeld arranged for us to meet up with the Zamenhofs and their new baby in Berlin so that we might travel the rest of the way with them to Paris.

DR. ZAMENHOF KISSED
my cheeks in the Zoologischer Garten station. “I’m only doing this,” he confided to me, “because it’s become more and more clear to me each day that my face and name somehow make Esperanto palatable to the common man. Ideas and principles stir only the cold hearts of the intelligentsia, I’m afraid.”

Fraŭlino Bernfeld embraced her Majstro warmly.

“Ah, when will you two finally set the date?” he asked, his beard bristling with goodwill at the sight of the two of us together.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s face reddened and not because she was blushing. “Here’s Klara!” she said, waving to Dr. Zamenhof’s dour little edzino, trundling off the train with the toddler Lidja in her arms. They ran to greet one another, and Dr. Zamenhof cast me a puzzled look.

“I’ll explain later.”

“Certe, certe.”

“And in private.”

“I hope I haven’t misspoken.”

“No, no.”

“But how many years
has
it been now?”

“Well, that’s a bit of a sore subject, I’m afraid.”

Though fraŭlino Bernfeld and I spent nearly every day together, growing closer and dearer to each other, in the few years since we’d returned from Warsaw, I’d been unable to bring myself to propose. The words
Fraŭlino Bernfeld, will you marry me?
were often upon my lips, and yet I seemed incapable of summoning breath to utter them. The question lingered, unasked, in all our conversations, and though fraŭlino Bernfeld tried to remain at all times pleasing and lovable (for what man proposes marriage to a vexed harridan?), almost anything could set her off. A wedding dress in a shop window, a baby pram in a park, an old wife buttering a roll in a café for her elderly husband, and she became instantly petulant, sulky, punitive, and severe. Even the sight of the Christ child and the Virgin Mother embittered her, and replicas of these were displayed, of course, all over Vienna. Also, it was impossible to jolly her out of these moods once one had captured her. Speaking sweetly to her was unfeeling condescension; returning her coldness only drove her further away. It was like trying to talk two cats out of a tree at once: every attempt to bring down one merely let the other climb higher and farther. If I bought a new suit, she criticized my taste: “Still a Galitsyaner, I see!” If I dropped my keys, she laughed: “Well done!” If I ordered for her in a restaurant, she felt demeaned; if I didn’t, ignored. If I called her on the telephone, the sound of my voice seemed to multiply her burdens; if I refrained from calling her, her voice, the next time, dripped with recrimination. (Her father, I imagined, was watching it all from the side, pleased to have his expectations realized.) Naturally, I became confused! When fraŭlino
Bernfeld was away from me, I hungered for her, but as soon as we were together, I longed to be rid of her again. At times, I could barely stand the sight of her, though this was only because the sight of me seemed to repulse her so. And yet there were days on which marriage, weddings, children, and babies didn’t seem to matter to either of us, and on those days, everything between us was again as sweet as it had always been.

The train blew its whistle; the engine juddered to life. Though we’d ridden to Berlin in first class, continuing on in that manner was too much of an extravagance for the Zamenhofs, and rather than embarrass them, fraŭlino Bernfeld had booked the rest of our trip alongside them in third. We squeezed into our new seats, bumping the knees of our fellow passengers, none of whom I suspected knew they were traveling with a visionary whose name they would, in the next few years, know as well as they now knew Galileo, Darwin, and Copernicus.

Dr. Zamenhof took the baby from his wife while she settled in. As the train lurched forward, Klara asked for the child to be returned. “Oh, give her back to me, Lutek.” She was an older mother, and the unexpected joy of having a small child to care for at her age was clearly something she cherished. Things had been so desperate for them for so long, and yet now here she was on her way to Paris, a new mother traveling with her husband whose great work was at last being feted. The little family seemed to radiate a kind of joy, palpable, I thought, to everyone in the car. When I turned to fraŭlino Bernfeld to confirm this impression, however, she gave me a look that was so black, it was nearly blinding.

Dr. Zamenhof opened his briefcase and placed it upon his lap as a makeshift desk and immediately set to work.

“Paĉjo has so many letters to write, Lidja,” Sinjorino Zamenhof said to their daughter, her lips pressed against the crown of her head. “Ah, look, Lilke, cows!” She pointed out the window as the German countryside rolled by with its chocolate-colored cows and its green farmland and its distant church spires.

“Forgive my rudeness,” Dr. Zamenhof apologized, “but I must attend to my speech.”

“Ah! You’re giving a speech?” I said.

“Of course, he’s giving a speech,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said.

Sinjorino Zamenhof smiled to herself.

Dr. Zamenhof sighed. “If I had my way, I’d be a simple Esperantist, like everyone else, merely one of the people.”

“But you’re not one of the people,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said, as cordial to him as she had been uncordial to me.

“A congress speech!” I said, ignoring fraŭlino Bernfeld’s coldness. “What a marvelous idea! I wasn’t thinking! But of course, we must make an occasion of it. Hundreds of years from now, when the extraordinary work you’ve done” — I looked at our small group — “that we’ve all done has so transformed the world that its inhabitants will look back, shuddering at our times as though at a savage, barbaric epoch, the day the creator of the universal language addressed the first of his followers will stand out, like the Buddha’s Sermon of the Flower, as the inaugural act of a new and transcendent age!”

Dr. Zamenhof started to blush, but somehow forced himself not to, as though he feared blushing would signify not modesty but rather a false modesty overlaid upon a base of secret pride.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled in her cheeks as though she were sucking on a sour candy. “Oh, do shut up!” she said.

Everyone pretended not to hear her.

Dr. Zamenhof whispered.
From your mouth into God’s ears.
Then, like a cabaret emcee moving out of the white hot spotlight, he stepped back, as it were, and let his speech take center stage. “I’m planning, as is only appropriate, to end my little speech with a prayer.”

“Are you now?” I said.

“That’s lovely, Lutek,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said. “No, it really is. Just lovely.”

Sinjorino Zamenhof distracted herself by primping the baby’s blanket, as though she understood that her pride in her husband might irritate his lack of vanity.

“And have you finished it?” I said.

“Stop pestering him!” fraŭlino Bernfeld said.

“Am I pestering you, Dr. Zamenhof?”

“In draft only,” Dr. Zamenhof answered me carefully, unwilling to
step into the middle of our quarrel. “Some of the rhymes are proving difficult.”

“And may we hear it?”

“If he doesn’t wish to read it, Dr. Sammelsohn, you mustn’t force him!”

“As a matter of fact,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “I
would
like to try it out before presenting it to the entire congress.”

“Then by all means,” fraŭlino Bernfeld said. “By all means. Of course.”

No one knew how many attendees to expect. For all we knew, there might be more listeners in our little third-class rail car than at the congress and so we settled back into our seats, while Dr. Zamenhof, a cigarette dangling between his fingers, riffled through the papers stacked atop his briefcase. With the cigarette between his lips, he squinted through its smoke. “Ah, yes, here it is,” he said. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and looked shyly about him. Certain no other passengers were listening, he began: “Al Vi, ho potenca senkorpa mistero …”

Directly addressing the mysterious
Vi
of the Universe, the You who without form flows like a fountain of love and truth and life into the heart of every living being, the You who created and rules over a perfect world that we have bloodied with our wars, the prayer promised that we will strive beneath the green banner of Esperanto until all mankind is united in complete harmony and that, at the end of our struggles, despite the hindrances, the walls that divide us will crack and tumble with a mighty roar, so that truth and love might at last come into their own.

The last stanza, exhorting brothers to come together and join hands, concluded with a remarkable line:

Kristanoj, hebreoj aŭ mahometanoj
Ni ĉiuj de Di’ estas filoj.

Yes, yes, yes! I thought. All men, Christians, Jews, and Muslims,
are
brothers. They
are
children of one God. Isn’t that exactly what my old father couldn’t see? Of course, he had sufficient reason not to see it. Even as we hurtled along towards our congress of utopiaj samideanoj, the tsar’s army was firing on unarmed workers, nationalist strikes were whipping
up across the Russian Empire, and as always, the easily distractible kulaks were being easily distracted from their own misery and encouraged to inflict it upon Russia’s poor Jews instead, in the face of which Dr. Zamenhof’s all-too-Jewish utopianism might seem laughable, and yet the sponsors of our congress — I reminded myself — were not unworldly Jews, like Dr. Zamenhof and me, but worldly, realistic Frenchmen — Europeans, vraiment! — as devoted as was our Majstro to the cause of a universal language.

“It’s a fine piece of work,” I said, genuinely stirred.

Dr. Zamenhof handed the pages to fraŭlino Bernfeld who had asked for them. She dampened them with her tears. He rummaged through his briefcase again, once again letting his cigarette dangle between his lips, squinting through the smoke, unable to find whatever it was he was searching for.

Finally, he gave up the search.

“My mother was a believer,” he said, crossing his legs and letting his briefcase drop. “My father an atheist.” He looked out at the landscape, his eyes misting over. “As a child, I too believed in God and in the immortality of the soul, exactly as our rabbis taught us. I don’t remember precisely when I lost my faith, but I do recall that I reached the highest peak of my unbelief at the age of fourteen or fifteen, and that this was the most tormented period of my life.”

“But why, Majstro?”

He gave fraŭlino Bernfeld a sad smile, his mustaches crinkling. “Life lost all sense and value.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t help but regard myself and other human beings with contempt. What was man then, but a piece of meat, created without reason or purpose to live for an instant before two eternities of darkness? What was I living for? What was the point of all my learning? It all seemed so senseless and absurd …”

He stared out the window again. fraŭlino Bernfeld looked at her gloves, folded in her hand; Sinjorino Zamenhof at the top of little Lidja’s head; Lidja looked at me. Dr. Zamenhof clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth. He lit another cigarette and drew its smoke deep into his lungs. “But then,” he said, “I don’t know why, but I came to feel that this was impossible, that death couldn’t be disappearance, that some law
of nature existed beyond the limited sight of our eyes, and that there was something reserving me for a higher purpose, although at the time I had no idea what it was, of course.”

“Of course,” fraŭlino Bernfeld whispered serenely.

I leaned forward, wanting to tell them all about Fräulein Eckstein and Ita and about how Ita and the two angels had appeared to Dr. Freud and me, and how Dr. Freud had denied everything; I wanted to tell them that the experience had made me want to dedicate myself to some higher calling, so that when I encountered Dr. Zamenhof and Esperanto, I had seen the hand of God in it. But before I could clear my throat, Dr. Zamenhof had laughed a bitter little laugh of self-mockery.