Frau Lyubanarov stood at the garden gate day in and day out, filled by her own sweet idling, her sumptuous presence like a piece of fruit ripening away in some secret understanding with the late sun. We saw a man wearing a large gray hat enter our yard and pass her by; his posture was ramrod-straight, and he exuded a pallid, grim determination that seemed manic. Ruthlessly he passed through the force field of her honey-smile and emerged unscathed, then approached the house with decisive steps. The ingrained tautness of his bearing reminded us of the artificial vigor in the gait of our hunchbacked seamstress, Fräulein Iliuţ; the steady output of energy had become second nature by dint of cultivation and habit, just as her misshapen body had mobilized its reserves and developed unexpected powers, even a certain degree of grace. The tortured correctness of his clothing seemed provincial. His summer suit was tastefully understated in its cut and pattern, but its ironed surfaces and creases were so immaculate and pristine it looked like it had been hanging in the closet for a very long time. His smooth brown leather gloves were carefully buttoned at the wrists, and his broad-brimmed felt hat sat upright on his head with a defiant ponderous formality that showed through despite all intention to appear casual. A brooding earnestness and a knee-jerk pride—compensation for the visible discomfort with his own person—lent him an air of macabre absurdity. I caught myself thinking that it was the hangman in civilian clothes, en route to a quaint and wholesome little spa where he intended to spend his vacation—incognito, of course. Full of curiosity, we strained to see below the brim of the travel hat that had been arranged on his head with an angry attention to detail: it shaded his eyes and was underscored by the parallel lines of a vigorously trimmed mustache. Our gaze perceived nothing except for the impression of something alien, so far removed in time as to be anachronistic, or from another world entirely. And only after he had passed did we realize, more as a result of a slow, inner dawning than a clear and precise recognition—that it was Tildy.
Will it sound off-putting if I say that we weren’t the least bit dismayed to realize who it was? But this was not because our other image of the man had faded; on the contrary, it had long ago acquired a life of its own, inside us, unfettered from his person, forever free and independent—the hussar in his dazzling uniform that threw off sparks of blue and gold, his stallion and saber transforming him into a dangerous hornet, the menacing protector of his lady who glided alongside, at rest in the shell of her sleigh, the dogs dancing around like a pack of mythic guards … It’s true that this image had flashed by in an instant, straight into the enigmatic depths of the past, where it was entrusted to our powers of imagination before our eyes scarcely could take it in. But that doesn’t mean that it had become a dream with no correspondence to reality—no, that wasn’t the reason we remained unmoved when confronted with the actual man. In fact, it was precisely because we recognized him, because our vision of the hussar was a perfect, seamless match with the somber stranger in his well-preserved travel suit—that is to say, the reality was so convincing it left us no room for baffled amazement.
Because this reality was inherently transcendent, made plain to us by a gently persistent illumination, a dawning sobriety, which although it did not originate with this reality and in fact barely touched its skin, much less its core, did offer an intimation, like the distant echo of a sounding, that all reality occurs in this way: not merely in the sense that our expectations of life might find fulfillment—albeit only as it is granted or rather fated—so that we only acquire late in life what anticipation has long divested of its true value, but also because the reality never really affected us directly. However, even if the world was removed in a way that made it impossible for us to truly experience it, we nevertheless clearly felt how much it molded us from without, from outside ourselves. No refraction by the prism of perception can diminish the power of the events themselves. Tildy had come to talk to Aunt Paulette about his wife, since he knew our aunt was a friend of Herr Adamowski’s. Because Tamara Tildy had left the house in our neighborhood and moved in with Herr Adamowski.
Naturally we never found out anything about the conversation he had with our aunt. He left half an hour later and cut through the aura of the woman at the garden gate, his countenance unmoved, his back flat and straight as a board. Overcome with curiosity, we ran into the house and ascertained what we could. All we were told was that Tildy had finally been released from the asylum, but was going back one more time—presumably to fetch his things. As for his future, they simply shrugged their shoulders. Given the party now in power, there could be no talk of his being rehabilitated.
“Won’t he duel with any of the men he challenged?” We posed our question in all innocence but they didn’t understand that and dismissed it as inappropriate and silly.
That same afternoon, Frau Lyubanarov vanished from the gate.
“If you didn’t know who she was waiting for, day in and day out,” Widow Morar later told us, smiling with eyes closed in a state of ecstasy, as if blinded by the joyful truth coming out of her golden mouth, “if you didn’t know before, then now you do: he was the one she was waiting for. And every man that passed by was his herald. Because she has evil in her blood. She was conceived in sin and born and nursed with her mother’s hatred, the hatred of a common maid. She had to wait for him in order to annihilate him, out of hatred for the other who is her sister and is not her sister, a princess so delicate and so unique that in this world she is like a butterfly in a thunderstorm.”
But the strange thing was that our old friend’s oracular whisper now struck us as vapid. The biblical intonation, part curse and part annunciation, which used to cause our eyes to gape and filled our hearts with an almost holy awe, no longer held us in its spell. The monotony of her interpretations began to bore us. Their mythic oversimplification no longer sufficed to explain all the incomprehensible things that life now offered.
Another strange thing happened: our interest in the fate of our hero declined—or you might say became more abstract—just as his dramatic situation was approaching its pointed end. Much later, while reading Dorian Gray, we would be upset by a cynical remark of Lord Henry concerning the suicide of Sibyl Vane: namely, that he felt younger by years upon hearing that romantic gestures of that magnitude, which no one really believed people actually did, truly happened. Our experience was just the opposite, although it did not completely contradict that sentiment: namely, that living through a genuine drama only amplifies its incredibility; in other words: that the loss of reality stands in direct proportion to the intensity of the experienced reality. The appearance of Tildy shorn of mystery only touched us on the outermost surface because it was so irreversibly real; and in that same way, the news of his death and the circumstances surrounding it merely struck us as a distant echo. It took a long time for his story to become absorbed in us—a long time and much travel until we regained the wondrous world of the literary existence of our childhood.
As for Frau Lyubanarov’s disappearance from the garden gate, which would set off subsequent events, we heard yet other commentaries.
“Que voulez-vous?” asked Uncle Sergei. “The fact that she went after him is the most basic female psychology. He almost fought a duel on her behalf. What can convince a woman more about her man than his willingness to die for her? Read Leskov …”
Aunt Paulette, to whom he was speaking, remained unmoved for some time, and then said, slothfully: “Yes, I will read your poet in order to better understand women. But I think there’s a simpler explanation: He was the only one who never paid attention to her.”
“How so?” Uncle Sergei was getting worked up. “Are you saying that a man wouldn’t even notice the woman for whom he is willing to risk his life, not even with a small corner of his fantasy? Ah, chère cousine, you consider us men to be less coquettish than we really are.”
“No. I think you are every bit as exaggerated.”
“It only speaks for the unfortunate Major Tildy that he was willing to
duel for a principle,” Aunt Elvira chimed in quietly. She didn’t have to swallow the rest of the sentence, since her meaning was written clearly on her face: “—and not for a woman like that.”
Conversations that we chanced to overhear—or, better put, monologues of this sort that were directed against each other—left us irritated, and we responded by being willful and recalcitrant. Against our great reluctance, they exposed us to the entirely new field of stupidity, full of hidden snares. We didn’t encounter the dangers they posed until much later, and even then it’s possible we never fully understood them.
Much later we had an opportunity to hear Herr Tarangolian’s view of the events back then. By that point he had long since removed himself from our world, so we had to remind him of certain specifics surrounding the case before he could recall it in any detail.
“You may rest assured that Tildy wasn’t the only one immune to the charms of this woman,” the prefect said, with dignity, adjusting the flaming red carnation in his buttonhole. “And of course there might be a kernel of truth in the theory that his evident indifference provoked her to follow him all the way to the asylum. But not much more truth than Sergei Nikiforich’s version or the one espoused by your macabre Widow Morar. Or even in the view of Fiokla Ignatieva, which, if I remember correctly, was far more plain and simple: namely, that no other man came down the street that afternoon. Believe all of it and none of it. In general, you should always believe everything and nothing at the same time. This formula is particularly recommended in psychology, which is the reason why that field is so popular, and why it is always correct in the general application and never in the specific case. So always take hold of the most obvious interpretation, while at the same time searching for the most remote.”
“And what would that be?” we asked, resigned to an answer we thought we knew in advance.
“If you’re asking for my own interpretation,” said the prefect, “it would be this: it had to happen, because it happened in Czernopol. Admittedly, there’s no logic in that explanation, but at least it has as much truth as all the others. Because no matter how much you might learn by studying a fateful chain of events: you can never escape from the notion of Providence—if you understand what I mean by that.”
He nodded majestically, taking his leave, and was about to turn to someone else, but then suddenly stopped us with his old, familiar smile.
“I often used to wonder,” he said, “what it really was you saw in Tildy. At times I thought I understood. I also thought I ought to warn you against it. Because what you presumed to see in him—or what you yearned for—is something, my young friends, that does not exist. Our vulgar world lacks the form that a human could adopt so perfectly that it would become transmuted into the heavy core of a magical force field. Those are legends, like that of the Grail, where the absolute ideal of chivalry is endowed with mystical significance. Very nice, of course, as a rough draft, a desired ideal—but only as a utopian one—in other words, as the hope of fools. At the same time”—and here the prefect’s expression became terribly contorted in the failed attempt to conceal his utter hatred behind a façade of joviality—“there is still a powerful difference between Percival, the savior, who is, in that he is, in coming, and a monomaniacal fool who pigheadedly opposes the world with his rigid principles. Clearly much was lost with the passing of the black-and-gold glory of the Austrian double eagle, much that we who are robbing its corpse, so to speak, mourn and miss. But the code of honor espoused by its booted and spurred cavaliers isn’t worth shedding any tears over. We can be thankful to Tildy for showing us exactly how ridiculous it was … Farewell, and please give my best to your esteemed parents.”
That was our last meeting with the prefect, and it took place at a fête that Madame Aritonovich gave to celebrate the tenth-year anniversary of the Institut d’Éducation; she could hardly foresee that it would soon be shut down under pressure from the nationalists, because she was a Russian. So we once again found ourselves among our friends from that brief episode when we had been her pupils. To be sure, Blanche Schlesinger was missing: shortly after the night of the “Petrescu-pogrom”—as the unfortunate events were called—her father had been called to Heidelberg, and she was living with him there. She had written to us how extremely happy she felt in Germany; for the first time in her life she felt free from fear. Sadly, after just a few letters back and forth the correspondence trickled out. But now I want to tell without interruption what happened on the day Tildy came to see Aunt Paulette, and in the following night:
Tildy had returned to the asylum, presumably to take care of the formalities regarding his dismissal, or perhaps to spend a few more days there, since he had no roof over his head, as the saying goes. In any event Frau Lyubanarov followed him, whatever her motivation.
I’ve often pictured the two of them on their way: the landscape at the edge of town, a belt of fields opening onto the vastness steeped in melancholy, and the figure of the man, in his stiff, ramrod-straight, tin-soldier daintiness, marching unwaveringly ahead, followed at some distance by the woman in her colorful knit peasant blouse, moving in a lazy saunter, swaying her beautiful hips, her topaz gaze fixed ahead, lethargically and dreamily, an aster stem between her teeth, barely touched by her lips. I imagined her passing the gardens with no apparent purpose, as if the sweetness of doing nothing were pulling her into a violet-blue Somewhere. I pictured her lazy, voluptuous gait in front of the bizarre architecture of the Feuers’ house, whose absurd Nordic ornamentation seemed practically Chinese, and I perceived the melody of both, that of the house and the woman, a Nouveau Arts and Crafts Wagnerian motif together with a flute theme distilled into ever higher spheres of sensuality—both tinged and intertwined with the sounds of a Jewish fiddle shifting between major and minor keys in a resigned, ironic melancholy, bowed by an old beggar who sat in the dust of the curb on the outskirts of town, in front of the poor simple little houses that looked as though they had been constructed by schoolchildren, with white-and-yellow walls, their pitiful lamps emerging against the pigeon-like blue of the twilight and igniting within ourselves our common forlornness, and the great sense of humility that entailed: an old man offering his poverty to God, rendering his meekness in tones and colors; a blind man whose smile was turned inward, whose pallid skin was patinated with hunger and verged on pistachio green, whose archaically and beautifully curled iron-gray sidelocks cascaded below the brim of his cracked and worn lacquered Galician cap, trimming the threadbare violet of his old coat with the sumptuous purple of inalienable human dignity. And in my mind I also always added the distant stamping of the musicians on the dance floors in the outlying districts, drifting on the wind, as they filled the tedious emptiness of a Sunday afternoon playing their music for homesick soldiers and their girls: the endlessly repeated and monotonous rum-ta-ta which now and then was drowned out by a single trumpet like a cock’s cry that faded with the frailty of all yearning, giving way to the dull, muted explosions of the cymbals amid the double basses and drumrolls. In later years nothing came so close to recalling the city of Czernopol as this image composed of themes, colors, and sounds—and movement that was deeply meaningful and extremely sparse. It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams or drafts.
The large and repulsively desolate brick building of the asylum lay strictly isolated toward the front of large area that stretched back toward the open country and was enclosed by a wall taller than a man. I can still clearly feel our horror at discovering the razor-sharp bottle shards embedded in the mortar of the top of the wall, apparently to hinder people from climbing over. At the same time, the entrance gate was constantly open, and it was hard to guess which of the people loitering about and chattering the day away might be the gatekeeper. Later we learned that
it was never shut at night, either. Why should it be? The dangerously insane couldn’t be let outside without supervision, and the harmless crazy people who worked in the garden or helped out in the kitchen were said to be as used to their surroundings as pets and showed no inclination to leave. Of course one could only imagine what took place behind the securely barred windows of the cells inside. We had always contented ourselves with a glance through the gate at the sober, rectangular barrack with bricks of an unhealthy, almost feverish red that reminded us of the shades of scarlet in the raw meat at butcher shops. Still, there was something pleasantly dapper about the sharp contours beneath the flat tin roof, and when we looked further, to the plain rows of vegetable beds, we saw men dressed in the gray uniforms of the institution moving about—their figures made tiny by the perspective, just as the entire grounds seemed smaller and more distant, and all appeared neatly isolated, as if we were looking backwards through a telescope, or as if they had been painted with the dilettantish precision of so-called Sunday painters, as part of a daintified scene for a raree-show. It was exciting first to imagine Tildy entering the toylike simplicity of the enclosure with his unwavering tin-soldier march, shrinking as he stepped further away, a tiny particle of the whole, until he suddenly disappeared inside, swallowed up as if he had never belonged anywhere else but there and had only gone out for a brief walk, and then to picture Frau Lyubanarov pushing her way inside, bringing the hitherto still diorama into motion with her golden, swaying gait, causing the sleepwalking figures to dance around her peasant beauty so full of life, their faces tilted toward heaven, their eyes agape like seers, as they sought to follow and fix the odd thoughts and random insights that darted around their heads like magpies, occasionally responding with a blinding, empty laugh or a black storm of anger that was quickly sent off into the void.
An Ermine in Czernopol Page 40
