A Curable Romantic (71 page)

In this whirlwind of preparations — the good rabbi balked at my
request that he conduct the ceremony in Esperanto, and Dr. Zamenhof, no keeper of Sabbaths, was not to be permitted, as we’d wished, to sign the wedding contract — it never occurred to me how astonishing it was that, with a single day’s notice, the fraŭlino had found in the foreign shops of Geneva a perfectly tailored wedding dress (in which, parenthetically, she looked magnificent). Her hair, freed from its usual binding, was a mass of unruly curls. In addition, she wore long sheer gloves of patterned lace and, beneath her wide skirts, though neither I nor anyone else could see them, matching stockings that immodestly concealed the soft intoxicating flesh of her legs.

We’d scheduled the ceremony for four o’clock, hoping to give her father time to arrive. When half an hour had passed and Herr Bernfeld was still not present, Rabbi Himmelglocke insisted we begin. He had other duties to attend to, as did the witnesses, and our guests, congress participants all, needed to prepare for the evening’s festivities. As we were instructed to wear them beneath our top hats, yarmulkes were found for me, for Dr. Zamenhof, and for the three other Jewish Esperantists whom we’d asked to hold up the chupah with him. These included Drs. Javal and Ilia Ostrovski, physician to the recently deceased writer Anton Chekhov and the designer of the Esperanto flag. A prayer shawl was procured for me as well. Those who’d come to celebrate were divided, first by the rabbi and then by themselves, into three groups: men on one side of the sanctuary, women on the other, French intellectuals in the back, where they stood, keeping a cool distance from the exotic proceedings.

The hall was lit by candlelight. Dr. Zamenhof’s eyes were shining. A violinist played. My thoughts, as ever, were elsewhere: How many times have I stood beneath a wedding canopy? I wondered. And will this really be the last? (I couldn’t possibly have known then that this, the first marriage of my own contrivance — if one didn’t count fraŭlino Loë’s clandestine hand in the affair — would be only the third among, at the most recent counting, seven.) Or will Ita hound me beyond her grave to my own? There seemed little likelihood of that, and I congratulated myself on taking a stand against her. I had made my choice: rather than waiting forever for Ita in a Szibotya of my own making, I’d entered the braver newer world of our virgin century with fraŭlino Loë, meanwhile
trading our old sad dzjargon for the glories of la lingvo universala, and my father’s linguistic idiocies for Dr. Zamenhof’s visionary schemes.

When fraŭlino Loë appeared in the sanctuary, holding a bouquet of daisies dyed Esperanto green, I knew I’d made the correct choice. She was radiant, a study in white. She was, in fact, so beautiful I could barely look at her and instead lowered my gaze to her small feet, shod in white leather and peeking out from beneath the great, frothy bell of her wedding gown. With each of her tiny steps down the center aisle, the ensemble made a charming rustling sound. As she encircled me the seven requisite times, I caught a whiff of her perfume — cinnamon, honey, clove — and I nearly swooned. I mumbled a prayer of thanks and swore to whatever deity there was to raise our children in an Esperantan home, so that, as a family, we might lead the way to international brotherhood and peace.

Fraŭlino Loë revolved around me with such an hypnotic gait that I did, in fact, become hypnotized. Or at least partially so. I could feel myself standing outside the moment, gazing down upon it, as it were, from inside the synagogue’s domed ceiling. Removed from the proceedings in this way, I watched everything with a clarity that was astonishing to me. While Rabbi Himmelglocke was reading the wedding contract in Aramaic, in response to the sound of a door opening, fraŭlino Loë turned her head. Daylight from the front door spilled in through the second door, momentarily flooding the room. Loë nodded nearly imperceptibly, pleased it seemed, and I looked in that direction as two figures entered the sanctuary: Loë’s father, the great Hans Bernfeld, in his long black coat and his luxuriant black beard and, behind him, his amanuensis Herr Goldberg. The little scrollwork of Herr Bernfeld’s flaring nostrils was as articulated as the curls in a violin head as he literally turned up his nose at the proceedings before him.

Loë’s face darkened in response.

In the strange disembodied state I was inhabiting, I knew exactly what he was seeing: me, a silly man, completely beneath his daughter in status, in fortune, in intellect. He looked at our beloved Majstro and saw him for the humbug that he was: a Don Quixote in a ridiculous top hat, a child pretending to be a man, daydreaming of his useless utopias,
making speeches all over the world in an incomprehensible idioglossia. In an age more humane than ours, he would have been put down like a dog. Herr Bernfeld next glanced at Klara, crying into her kerchief. What was she but a simpering little cow, an addlepated Jewess, following her deranged husband, Sancho Panza–like, from kingdom to kingdom as he made a bigger and bigger ass of himself, squandering in the meantime her valuable dowry, which could have been invested towards excellent profit, and destroying their children’s names as well as their fortunes?

What were we all, really, but a silly bunch of Jewish dreamers, clowns, and buffoons?

Herr Bernfeld extended his hand, his palm raised towards Herr Goldberg, and lightly gestured with his fingers. Herr Goldberg removed a dossier from his briefcase, which he placed inside Herr Bernfeld’s open hand. Imprisoning Loë in his gaze, Herr Bernfeld indicated the dossier while giving her the blackest of looks.

She dropped her eyes to the floor and refused to look at him. He had no choice: surveying the sanctuary like a great predatory bird scratching out a place to sit, with Herr Goldberg, as always, a step and a half behind him, Herr Bernfeld searched for a seat. He moved first towards the women’s section before ruling it out. He lifted his eyes towards the balconies, uncertain why the women were not seated there where they belonged. Backing away from the men, repelled, I assumed, by their too-Jewish faces and their bold, misshapen noses, he had no choice but to stand in the back with the French, which he did, shaking hands and exchanging greetings, before adopting for himself their posture of uncomfortable disdain.

By this time, Rabbi Himmelglocke was chanting the Seven Blessings. Loë’s veil had been raised, and she was offered the wine to sip. She drank tentatively, choking a little, but then she took one sip after another and seemed so little inclined to release the silver goblet that Rabbi Himmelglocke had to pry it from her hands. He peered into the bell-shaped vessel and saw that there was no longer sufficient wine for me. Scowling, he refilled the goblet and forced it brusquely into my hand.

My drinking was disturbed by his hand clapping.
he exclaimed, and my feeling of disembodiment ended. I was again myself,
and I recalled, from my previous times beneath the chupah, that I was now expected to break the glass that the good rabbi had wrapped in a silk handkerchief and was placing upon the floor at my feet. I raised my foot, but before I could lower it, Loë picked up her skirts and dashed towards the doors, tripping over the cloth and crushing the little goblet herself.

“Fraŭlino!” I cried as she hurried from the sanctuary.

“Go after her!” Dr. Zamenhof advised me.

“Go! Go!” Dr. Javal seconded blindly.

I did as they commanded. “Fraŭlino!” I shouted again, running to the exit.

“Congratulations, old man.”

As I passed their frosty group, I heard the Frenchmen pressing their salutations upon Herr Bernfeld, whom they seemed to have gotten to know, in a single half hour, better than I had during the many years I’d been courting his daughter.

CHAPTER 12

I found la novan sinjorinon Sammelsohn downstairs in the room set aside for the bride and groom to spend a private moment alone together, her enormous wedding dress crumpled in a heap about her. She sat with her head upon the arm of the divan, weeping inconsolably, or at least as far as my abilities to console her were concerned.

Indeed, my presence only seemed to add to her distress. “Go away! Please go away!” she cried.

I was at my wit’s end, when a rapping sounded at the door.

“Loë,” I said. “There’s someone at the door, my darling.” I addressed her trembling back. “Should I answer it?” I said. “I will, if my doing so won’t distress you any further. However, if you’d rather I didn’t, I won’t, of course.”

Before I could do anything, the door was pushed open from outside.

“Dr. Sammelsohn,” Herr Bernfeld greeted me with a coldness all the more icy given the circumstances: I was his son-in-law now, the husband of his only daughter, and the father, I supposed, of his potential heirs. He was carrying the dossier I’d seen Herr Goldberg hand him.

“Herr Bernfeld,” I said, returning the greeting in kind.

“If you’ll excuse us and wait outside for a moment, Doktor.”

“Outside?”

“Are you deaf, man?”

“Wait outside my own yichud?”

I turned from his unsmiling face to Loë’s trembling back. Her shoulders juddered in anguish, her wailing swelled at the sound of her father’s voice. Should I stand my ground as Loë’s husband or surrender my place as her lord and master to its former occupant? Everything — my relations with my father-in-law, my marriage to his daughter, our future happiness — depended upon how I behaved in this moment, I knew.

Either I make my stand now or spend the rest of my life groveling in Herr Bernfeld’s majestic shadow.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” I said. Herr Bernfeld and I traded places. I was now outside the room, craning my neck to get a last glimpse of my new wife, when he slammed the door in my face. I lay my ear against the paneling but could hear nothing. The musicians Loë had hired were in the upstairs reception hall playing for our guests, guests who were, no doubt, at that moment, waiting to celebrate our arrival into that hall as man and wife. The music interfered with my eavesdropping. From the few sounds coming through the door, however, I could guess that harsh words were being exchanged. I heard intonations of recriminations, invocations of a dead wife, counterinvocations of a dead mother. Did I only imagine it or was a face slapped? And if so, was it his or, more improbably, hers?

After that, if that indeed is what I’d heard, everything went quiet and, a moment later, the door opened from within. Herr Bernfeld moved through its frame, closing it behind himself. Ashen-faced, he brushed past me without a word and quickly ascended the stairs to the small foyer above.

“Herr Bernfeld?” I said, going after him. Turning, he gazed down his long, slender nose at me, as though he were the millionaire he was and I a beggar who had dared to call him by his name. “The reception is that way,” I said, indicating that once he left the synagogue and entered the garden, he should follow the building round to the back, on the right. “There’s an entrance after a few stairs down.”

“I’m well aware of that,” he said, returning his hat to his head. With a click of his fingers, he summoned Herr Goldberg, who appeared, out of nowhere, carrying his master’s cloak. “Herr Goldberg,” Herr Bernfeld said, nodding. The two men exited without a glance backwards through the big double doors of the synagogue — the afternoon sun poured into the dark shul with such intensity I had to shield my eyes — and then like phantoms at daybreak, they were gone.

My instinct, now that I’d seen the trick performed, was to disappear myself, but I lacked the nerve. It was impossible to enter the reception
hall without Loë on my arm; neither did I feel secure in approaching her inside the bridal chamber. There was nothing to do but wait for her to emerge, sitting outside her door in the chair the shomer had hastily abandoned when Herr Bernfeld barged past him.

I SAT DOWN
and stood up and sat down again.

How much time passed in this way, I cannot say — my emotions were too roiled for me to keep track of the time — but the band seemed to have started its repertory over. The music filtered down through the ceiling above me. Certainly they were performing “Kiss Me Again” and “Because You’re You” for a second time.

My mind went to the dossier I’d seen Herr Goldberg handing to Herr Bernfeld in the synagogue. I shuddered to think what was in it. Knowing Herr Bernfeld, I’ve no doubt he’d hired a detective to look into my past. And what would he find there? Everything I’d been hiding from his daughter, all depicted in the worst possible light: that I’d been married twice, that I’d ruined my first wife and turned her against her family before coldly divorcing her, that the abandonment of my second wife drove her to suicide, that upon my arrival in Vienna, according to a certain Dr. Freud, I’d attempted to rape the woman I was courting, claiming in my defense that she was possessed by a demon. How appalling it all seemed minus one’s subjective justifications.

At one point, Dr. Zamenhof wandered down the stairs, in conversation with a Professor Couturat. Dr. Zamenhof looked at me queerly, alarmed to find me on the wrong side of the bridal chamber door, while Professor Couturat, knowing nothing of Jewish custom and having evinced no interest in my person, ignored me, or rather continued to ignore me, or rather failed to see me at all, pursuing his conversation with Dr. Zamenhof instead, the persistent tone of which precluded Dr. Zamenhof from even addressing me.