A Curable Romantic (80 page)

“What in God’s name are you doing with that piece of filth?” I said, coming in from la rue St. Louis.

“The general sent it to me,” she said.

“Ah, General Sébert? Did he? Well, throw it out. I’ll have nothing to do with it. This Monsieur Ido, whoever he is, is no friend of ours, and he’s certainly no son of Dr. Esperanto’s.”

“You sound indignant.”

“I am. The Delegation Committee was a complete farce!”

“Really?”

“Indeed.”

“Well, if that’s so …”

“Yes?”

“… then where were you, I’m wondering, when it was time for you as Boirac’s second to denounce these men for the blackguards you knew
them to be?” She ripped her reading glasses from her face and glared at me through no lenses but her own astigmatic exasperation. “Not out chasing little boys in the streets, I hope.”

“Sébert!” I cried. No doubt the general’s spy had apprised her of everything.

“Don’t!” Loë repulsed my hands when I reached for her shoulders. I peeked at the hotel’s concierge stationed at his desk. He dropped his gaze and pretended not to be following our conversation. Why must we always argue in front of bellhops and doormen?

“Unpack your bags and stay,” I said. “Let’s talk this over.”

“But these aren’t my bags, Kaĉjo.”

“They’re not?”

“No, they’re yours.”

“Mine?”

“I had them packed for you. I’m sending you home. I’ll be staying on in Paris. Perhaps the general and I can straighten out this mess. Albert,” she called over my shoulder to the concierge, “ring for a taxi for Dr. Sammelsohn. It should be here in a minute,” she told me.

“Loë,” I said again.

“How could you just let them steal everything from us?” Once again she slapped the pamphlet against her hand. “This has Couturat’s finger-prints all over it. Any child could see that. It’s all so very Leibnizian!”

I ARRIVED IN
Vienna and took a cab to our apartment. Herr Bernfeld met me at the door.

“I’ve taken the liberty of having your things boxed up and sent to your rooms in the Karlsplatz,” he said, screwing in his monocle. “There’s no telling when my daughter will return and no reason for you to stay on here, really, haunting the place like a ghost. Your continued employment at the firm is, naturally, out of the question.”

“Naturally.”

“However, I’ve spoken with Dr. Koller about the possibility of your returning to the clinic.”

“And?”

“I am happy to report I’ve managed a fifteen percent rise in your salary.”

He was sorry to have heard about the debacle in Paris, he told me. However, had he been consulted, he would have warned us against exactly this sort of treachery.

“Esperanto may be capable of reform, but not so men’s hearts.”

He held my hand in parting, and despite everything, I was grateful for the warmth of his touch.

CHAPTER 2

And seven years later, when the Serbian madman Gavrilo Princip assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Europe set to cannibalizing itself, none of it, I regret to say, took me by surprise — neither the ferocity of the hatreds evinced on all sides nor the lethal shortsightedness of men who had earlier possessed loftier temperaments. Hadn’t I lived through the entire thing in miniature, my naïveté burnt to cinders by the Idists? After witnessing excellent men devouring one another in the service of a benevolent idea, the Great War seemed little more than a fully staged version of an opera I’d already seen as a chamber piece.

All about me, men of good sense, men who should have known better — and by that, I mean writers, doctors, artists — felt their blood quickening at the thought of a good, purgative war. And while these men, in their last moments of freedom, set about proposing marriage to girls or purchasing new piping for their military costumes, I simply took mine out of its trunk — it stank of moth balls, perspiration, and the odium of military life — and spent nothing on its rehabilitation. As for girls, I had none to propose to.

Still, the emperor needed all his sons, not merely the enthusiasts, and having been long in the reserves — the Thirty-fifth Yeomanry was my home — I was mustered into the medical corps as an officer and sent to the Eastern Front with a truckload of optical equipment. In no more than two hours, my assistants and I — these were a Dr. Gleissner and a Dr. Winternitz — had been captured by a Russian lieutenant and locked inside a tavern and promptly forgotten. “The war is over for us, lads,” I told them, happy to have spent nothing smartening up my uniform. We spent the night and the next day and the night after that requisitioning the tavern’s whiskey and sleeping across its long tables, while the battle of
Przemysl raged on in the distance. We could hear the howitzers booming and the planes groaning overhead.

At daybreak of the second day, I ordered Dr. Gleissner to open up the tavern door, which he did, although not without difficulty, bruising his shoulder in the process. The morning light poured in, momentarily blinding us. Birdsong filled the air. Venturing out, we discovered the corporal who had been our guard, sitting not far from the door with a bullet wound in his head. “Take his gun,” I gave the order to Dr. Winternitz, “and his eyeglasses, I suppose.” We stashed these inside our truck and roared away, traveling no more than three kilometers before running out of petrol. We took turns pushing the truck after that. We might have abandoned it, I suppose. However, it contained valuable medical supplies belonging to the emperor. We pushed deeper into the countryside and, as we traveled, I began to recognize the hills and the dales and the little rivers. We weren’t far from Szibotya, I knew. We sheltered, in fact, for three days in my father’s old gazebo. It was in ruins by then. My parents were long dead, Father having perished in the Szibotya pogroms of 1905, Mother succumbing a few days later, some say of a broken heart, others by less gentle means.

I couldn’t bring myself to approach the house. Instead, I lay on my stomach in the grass, watching from a distance, as either Dr. Gleissner or Dr. Winternitz knocked upon the door to beg some food. The woman of the house brought out whatever she could. Periodically, as though she knew I was there, she’d raise a hand and cup it to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun and peering into the orchard, searching for me, or so it seemed, among the cherry trees.

After three days, I could take no more of this, and I gave the order to push on. Though we’d discussed it not at all beforehand, and though we’d pushed the damned thing all the way from Galicia, we abandoned the optical truck at the city gates of Vienna. Let the emperor come and claim his property if he wants it! Affecting limps and contriving slings, so we might at least appear to have been wounded, Dr. Gleissner and Dr. Winternitz and I bid one another farewell before stealing back into our former lives.

I unlocked the door of my rooms in the Karlsplatz and slept for what
seemed like a thousand and one nights in the soft sheets of my bed. Hobbling in on crutches the next morning, my arm in a sling, I reported not to the army board, where I was obligated by law and by my own failing sense of patriotism to report, but to the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, where I quietly took up my old position. After a decent interval, I unlaced the sling and replaced my crutches with a sturdy cane. I was nearly forty. Who was going to think anything of it?

EVEN AFTER THE
armistice, terrible privations ensued. The war had cost its sponsors billions, and we were all paying for it now. The only man I knew who avoided absolute ruin was my former father-in-law, Herr Bernfeld (now Baron Bernfeld, if that title meant anything still). Bernfeld & Sons, Inc., had actually profited from the war. At their father’s urging, a Bernfeld resided in nearly every European capital, and the brothers had sold arms to every side, trafficking in a dozen different currencies, so that by war’s end, the corporation had lost not one sou nor one heller nor one pfennig nor one penny nor one ruble to the new inflation.

Of the hundred million men mobilized on all sides, sixty million had been wounded and thirteen million killed, and though I’m loath to admit it, this left a considerable number of war widows in my immediate vicinity. While in other cities, jubilant soldiers marched in their victory parades, it was the women belonging to men they had slaughtered who paraded through my apartment and into my bed, a long line of comely widows, each a numbingly infinite variation on but a single theme. And though we were all very kind to each other, and grateful, I suspect, for these hours of reprieve, the sense that we were standing in for others — they for Loë, and I for scores of men — performing on their behalf an act they would not (in Loë’s case) or could not (in the case of the dead) perform, made of our couplings a grinding and repetitive business.

And one grey morning, bleary from a short night in the arms of a not terribly beautiful stranger, breathing in the soft fumes of her halitus, I extricated myself from bed and stood at my window, my thoughts turning east. Dr. Zamenhof had not survived the war, it’s true, but his children had, and among them, as I recalled, were two lovely daughters.

God only knew how they were faring, orphaned and alone. As I stirred
a curative dose of sugar into my coffee, for the first time in what seemed like ages, I sensed a glimmer of hope rising with the sun.

Perhaps a visit from Uncle Kaĉjo was in order.

OR ONKLO KAĈJO
, rather.

As the porter led me into the vestibule, I calculated how many years had passed since fraŭlino Loë and I had visited, and the answer I arrived at was: nearly twenty-five! Certainly I was no longer the young swain I’d been. On the contrary, in the intervening years, I’d become that most ridiculous of persons: a bachelor in his late middle years. Upon our greeting one another, however, I could detect no astonishment in either Adamo’s or Zofia’s eyes at the grey-bearded gentleman standing before them.

No, as I’d been an adult when they were children, I appeared to them as I always had, as an old man; and this was my first indication, received as soon as I’d crossed their threshold, that Zofia would never consent to be my lover, to say nothing of my wife. Additionally — and it pains me to confess this — she was no longer la bela junulino I remembered from the early congress days. Gone was the little girl who’d so dopily anticipated my proposal to her onklino Loë. In her place stood a stout matron with an incipient mustache. (She’d had a rough few years, I’d learn over dinner that evening, serving as a medic in either the Russian or the Polish army, I can’t remember which, while her brother served, as a medic as well, in the opposing corps.)

Nevertheless, she greeted me warmly. “This way, Onklo Kaĉjo, and we’ll show you to your room.”

Dr. Adamo, tall and courtly, took my arm, and guided me towards the stairs. “You remember Lidja, of course,” he said.

“Of course,” I said, although when I’d seen her last, she’d been a toddler in her mother’s arms, and this was an image that I found
I
couldn’t excise from
my
mind. Though a willowy woman in her twenties, she seemed as much a baby to me as she always had, and I realized with a pang that my dream of finding a bride among la Zamenhofidinoj was simply one more impossible scheme.

(Why must everything concerning the Zamenhofs fall into that category?)

It was all I could do not to turn around, descend the stairs, hail a taxi, depart for the train stations, and return to Vienna at once. In fact, the only thing that stopped me from doing so, besides my own social cowardice — which has stopped me from doing half the things I’ve wanted to my entire life — was the sight of Wanda Zamenhof, Dr. Adamo’s young wife, who, at that moment, joined us, stepping into the foyer from the kitchen, drying her hands on a kitchen towel.

The introductions were quickly made, and I took her in with the rapacity of an old starving wolf, devouring her optically from the cap of her ruby-blonde head to the meat of her calf, and was startled, as I did, to find a child hiding behind her shapely legs.

“Well, well, well, who’s this then?” I said, crouching down to greet him. His fingers digging into his mother’s thigh, he hid his eyes against her skirt. The adults all laughed. The boy was dressed in a little sailor’s suit, which seemed an odd touch to me, given the family’s pacifism. He’d obviously wanted to greet the visitor but had found himself, at the decisive moment, too shy to do so.

“Now, Lutek,” one of his aunts said, her admonition making him peek out at me.

I offered him my hand. “Doktoro Jakovo Jozefo Sammelsohn.”

“Ludovic Zamenhof,” he said in his tiny voice.

(His parents had named him after his grandfather, of course.)

“Care for a lollipop?” I reached into my coat pocket for the sweet.

He shook his head fiercely and withdrew even further behind his mother’s skirts. Still crouching, I gazed up the tower of her legs. Staring down at the two of us, she took the candy from my hand, and by way of apologizing for her son’s rudeness, said, “Perhaps he’ll feel differently after dinner, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

AS THEY WERE
too polite to do so, it was I who brought Loë up, later in the evening, when we were all seated around the dining room table.

“Yes, we occasionally hear from la sinjorino,” Dr. Adamo replied. “In fact, she recently sent funds for Father’s tomb.”

“Ah, did she?” I said.

“I believe she’s on the point of remarrying,” Zofia said.

I nodded grimly. “So I understand.”

“And you’ve never thought of remarrying, Onklo?” Lidja asked.

As though caught off-guard, I glanced up from my aperitif, leaving my lips on the rim of the glass. Returning the drink to the table, I said, “Well, that’s precisely why I’m here, Lilke.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, to see which of the two of you will have me.”

The laughter occasioned by this remark was so open and affectionate, so joyous and mirthful and sweet, I couldn’t fail to understand how ridiculous, how utterly impossible, the notion of my marrying one of them seemed.

At the sound of his parents’ and aunts’ laughter, little Ludovic let out a squeal.