A Curable Romantic (79 page)

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

Professor Leau gave me an odd look. I’m certain I looked a shambles.

“Gone,” he said simply.

“Gone?”

“Everyone left after the voting, of course?”

“The
voting
?”

Professor Leau squinted up at me over the ovals of his reading glasses. “Weren’t you here?”

“Certainly I wasn’t, no.”

“Ah, yes, that’s right,” he said. “I thought I saw you leaving. Well, not long after that, Professor Couturat declared that the committee’s theoretical discussions had reached their natural conclusion, and that it was time to put the matter to a vote.” He searched through the pages of his cahier. “As you can see, it’s noted here that the president of the Esperanto Language Committee abstained.”

“Abstained?”

He shrugged good-naturedly in that handsome way of his. “You were Rector Boirac’s second, weren’t you?”

“And … and what language was ultimately voted on?” I said.

“Oh.” He smiled. “I’m pleased to report that Idiom Neutral finally met its defeat.”

“Ah. Very good.”

“Yes, even Professor Jespersen abandoned his support of it. Many of its forms, he conceded at last, are ungraceful.”

“And so then, that means … ?”

“Esperanto won the day.”

“Thank God!”

“After which, Professor Couturat called for another vote.”

“Another vote?”

“This one proposing that certain reforms be adopted into it — ”

“Certain reforms!”

“ — along the lines of those proposed by Monsieur Ido in his pamphlet, which the marquis, acting as Dr. Zamenhof’s representative, accepted and approved.”

“The marquis …
endorsed
the reforms? But he wasn’t even entitled to vote!”

“Naturally not. Nevertheless, his opinion on the matter carried great weight with the members of the committee, and in light of this, the measure passed by a majority,” Professor Leau said, reading from his notes, “with the president of the Esperanto Language Committee once again noted as abstaining.”

“But I didn’t even vote!”

“Which” — Professor Leau pointed to his cahier — “is why I noted your abstention.”

“But these abstentions do not accurately reflect the will of either Rector Boirac or myself!”

“Oh.” His handsome face crumbled into a sympathetic scowl. “Well, that
is
unfortunate.”

“You must allow me to change my vote.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Sammelsohn. After the voting, the committee was dissolved, again by unanimous consent, minus your abstention, and I can’t very well put into the minutes observations of events that didn’t occur.”

My legs buckled, and I fell into a chair.

I looked out the room’s tall windows at the murky October sky. Throughout the committee meetings, as I’d been instructed to do by Rector Boirac, I had given a daily report, via telephone, to general Sébert, but each day, by a means unknown to me, the general seemed to have already obtained a detailed précis of the day’s events, which, at some point in the afternoon, he must have shared with Loë — since our arrival in Paris, the two had become fast friends — as there was nothing I could tell either of them — to Sébert via telephone; or to Loë, upon meeting her later for dinner — that they didn’t already seem to know.

(The general, after a long career of military strategizing, had obviously thought to make one of the collège’s secretaries, or perhaps one of our waiters, his spy.)

I sat trembling in the now-empty chamber. I knew the news of my perfidy, through the agency of General Sébert’s spy, had probably already reached my wife, and suddenly, I was no longer a grown man sitting in a splendid chamber in the Collège de France, but a boy in his father’s gazebo, General Sébert’s unknown spy substituting for my sister, whose back I watched, in memory, receding into the distance as she raced through our father’s orchards, shrilling his and my mother’s names into the air, ferrying back to them the report of my treachery, whose consequence, I knew, would be my eviction from their lives.

How could it be any different with Loë? Forgiveness wasn’t exactly her métier.

With a leaden foot, I made my way back to our hotel, doubting she would even be there when I arrived, and knowing that, if she were, she would most likely have already booked herself a separate room.

BOOK THREE
ON THE DEVIL’S ISLAND;
or, My Life and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto

CHAPTER 1

I felt terrible, of course. Overestimating the quality of my character, as he was wont to do with all men, Dr. Zamenhof had invested me with his trust, and I had failed him. I’d fallen asleep at my post. At the precise moment my presence was most needed in the committee chambers, I was loose upon the streets, chasing down a young pick-pocket, and not because he’d picked my pocket (which he had done) but because I was under the impression he was the metempsychosical reappearance of my second wife.

Did I truly believe that a spiteful Ita had lured me out of the committee chambers in order to destroy the happiness I had found without her? Had I but thought the matter through, had I banked the fires of my heart, had I cooled my head with the balm of sweet reason, not only might Gaston yet be alive — the image of myself, cowering, as his tormentor pummeled him to death fills me with shame to this very hour — but the world might also now possess, as its common heritage, an international auxiliary language. One mustn’t underestimate its loss. Without it, we live that much farther outside the precincts of Eden.

However, whether I believed in this scenario of a vengeful, heart-broken dybbuk hardly mattered, as I was shortly to discover. Ita or no, we were surrounded by schemers and cheats.

MUST I REHEARSE
all the heartbreaking details?

Let me say only this: there is no spectacle less edifying than a turf war fought between intellectuals and idealists. Though no blood was spilled, many fortunes were lost and men’s good names blackened and their years of visionary labor squandered. The Delegation Committee, as it turned out, was a fraud, a swindle, a Potemkin village designed to wrest the international language movement out of Dr. Zamenhof’s utopian hands. Professor Couturat and the Marquis de Beaufront had been
in cahoots the entire time (and with Rector Boirac away in Dijon and myself otherwise engaged, there was no one to stand in their way).

As the treachery of these men became clear, Dr. Zamenhof refused to have anything further to do them, but that only made it easier for Professor Couturat to push forward with his schemes, and he began to act as though the committee hadn’t chosen Esperanto at all, but rather a new language of its own devising called Ido after its pseudonymous author.

Oh, yes, Esperanto might have been good enough for an Ostjude like me or Dr. Zamenhof, who, no matter how sophisticated we became, were still holding our breath, certain the Messiah was only one or two tram stops away, but the rest of the world needed something else: an international language enlightened by French culture, designed for the Western tongue, crafted to convey its most subtle and sublime philosophies. Ido, invented by hard-hearted scientists according to rock-hard scientific principle, would serve the needs of this real world without the burden of ungainly idealisms and other such fairy-lighted nonsense.

The war between Esperanto and Ido had begun. Abandoning his philosophical work, Professor Couturat pitched himself into battle. Between his scathing attacks on his opponents and his condemnation of the fissiparous tendencies of his own Ido Academy, he became that most uncompromising of men: the infallible pope of a small schismatic church, issuing his denunciations, broadcasting his excommunications, publishing his accusations in a universal language understood by only a tiny minority of men. Dr. Zamenhof, hoping to remain above the fray, was unable to defend himself against Professor Couturat’s bloodying attacks.

And by the time it was all over, both men were dead, and the international language movement lay in ruins. Esperanto’s great gains were sundered, and the worldwide momentum towards a universal language had splintered, exactly as Dr. Zamenhof had warned at my wedding, in a thousand schismatic directions.

AND WHO WAS
this mysterious Ido, this phantom linguist who’d graced the table with his reforms mere hours before the committee, unable to pledge itself wholeheartedly to Esperanto, might have floundered without them? Naturally, we were all shocked when the marquis unmasked
himself as the culprit in the pages of
L’Espérantiste.
A closet reformer, what sort of defense could a man like that have presented before the Delegation Committee on Esperanto’s behalf?

Still, upon further reflection, it made a kind of sense. Everything about the man was false. He had secrets hidden within his secrets. To begin with, he wasn’t even a marquis. Rather, the title had come to him late in his life and had been conferred upon him by no monarch grander than himself. Nor had he lost a family fortune. There’s little difference in appearance between a lost fortune and none at all, and the marquis exploited this fact. Even further: his name wasn’t Beaufront. Beaufront, as it turned out, was simply un beau front, a handsome façade. He’d been christened Louis Eugène Albert Chevreux, the bastard son of Louise Chevreux, his father unknown. Certainly he’d never mastered yogic breathing techniques under the tutelage of Swami Sri Giri, nor had he assisted Max Müller at Oxford on his translations of the Rig-Veda. Even the gazette in which he claimed to have read about Dr. Zamenhof’s books carried no such item; and his beloved Adjuvanto, it goes without saying, existed only as a smaller fiction within the grander fiction he’d created of himself.

“Of course, the marquis was Ido!” I said, slapping my hand against the pages of
L’Espérantiste.
And now, he’d even confessed to it!

There was only one problem: as with everything else about the marquis, this confession was a lie.

SECRETS LIKE THESE
cannot be kept forever, and when rumors of his authorship of the Ido pamphlet threatened to destroy the integrity of the Delegation Committee’s decision, Professor Couturat did what any man in his situation would do: he placed a letter, written ostensibly to de Beaufront, identifying the marquis as the author of the pamphlet, into an envelope addressed to Otto Jespersen in care of the University of Copenhagen and sent it off.

(Whether he placed a corresponding letter to Professor Jespersen in an envelope addressed to the marquis, I do not know, but I wouldn’t be surprised: in his deceptions, Professor Couturat possessed the thoroughness of a stage magician.)

The ploy worked. Puzzled to receive a letter from Professor Couturat that addressed him not as “Cher monsieur,” his customary salutation, but as “Mon cher ami,” Professor Jespersen was horrified by what he read next. If the marquis
were
Ido, and if Professor Couturat knew of this, what did it suggest about the integrity of the Delegation Committee’s decision to endorse Ido’s reforms?

(The answer: something less damning than what the truth itself would suggest — that Professor Couturat was Ido; that he had conspired with or perhaps even blackmailed the marquis into capitulating to Ido’s reforms; that all those long and tedious days in Paris had been exactly what Dr. Zamenhof claimed they were: a comedy prepared in advance in which Professor Jespersen and the other experts, there for the sake of their prestige, were manipulated like puppets, an assertion Professor Jespersen had consistently denied.)

(When news of all this reached me, I dashed from my apartments in the Karlsplatz, where I’d returned following my expulsion from the Bernfeld household, and I ran to the Prater, hoping to find Herr Franz in residence at his Marvelous & Astonishing Puppet Theater. I intended to propose to him that we collaborate on a puppet show chronicling my life in the international language movement — I would author the script; he would design the figures — if for no other reason than that I relished a scene in which the marionette version of Otto Jespersen, suited in his academic gowns, his arms tangled up in his strings, his wooden forehead blushing beneath a patina of red paint, declares to an audience of mocking children that he is not now nor has ever been a puppet in the hands of a wily Couturat! The theater, however, had disappeared without a trace; in its place stood a key-making concession run by an unfriendly looking fellow with a large mustache.)

The letter caused Professor Jespersen enormous torment, and after many a sleepless night, he wrote to Professor Couturat, demanding the truth: Was the marquis Ido? When Professor Couturat confirmed this unhappy fact, Professor Jespersen insisted, in strongly worded letters to both men, that the fact be made immediately known. And when at last the marquis published his confession, Professor Jespersen was appeased and the matter closed, and Professor Couturat was free to devote
his considerable intellectual and financial resources to the battle against Esperanto.

THE MARQUIS BURNED
his correspondence with Professor Couturat, and so we’ll never know what brought the two together as conspirators. Some have suggested that, unlike Dr. Zamenhof, the marquis couldn’t resist a bribe; others that Professor Couturat knew a certain problematical something about de Beaufront’s private life. Whatever the truth, it seems to me that Professor Couturat and the marquis were after the same thing: an Esperanto sans the inner idea. Distressed over Dr. Zamenhof’s insistence upon making la lingvon universalan one more branch of le mystification Juiv, the marquis seized upon the opportunity to switch to a less ethereal horse in midstream, trading in the Hindenburg of Esperanto for the swift lifeboat of Ido an hour before he felt certain the former would crash and burn. And what did he have to lose, after all, except a handful of superfluous supersigns and the accusative -
n
?

LOË WAS WAITING
for me at our hotel when I arrived from that final committee meeting, her bags stacked next to her chair in the atrium. She had a copy of Ido’s pamphlet rolled up in one hand and was slapping it against the palm of the other.