Incidentally, even back then we must have been consciously prepared for beauty. Because the day we spotted the hussar had been preceded by another notable day, when Herr Tarangolian was walking through the garden and picked up a maple leaf that had decomposed into an enchanting filigree of delicate ribs and tiny veins. As he held it up to the light for us, the prefect declaimed with pathos: “But what is this? Art—art! And what has wrought it? Destruction. Ah, let me tell you, my young friends, learn to love destruction!”
Thus we had already seen what kind of artist winter can be in populated areas, for we loved winter in the city, especially in the gardens that skirted our street. And particularly the heart of winter, January, which brought Christmas, according to the reckoning of the Orthodox Church. We loved its dryness and severity, its veiled light in the frost, when the snow that had blanketed the entire landscape and erased all shapes finally subsided, and the contours emerged crisp and clear out of the immaculate white—no longer tinged with gray or yellow like on the days weighted with snow clouds—and were finally covered with a brittle, icy down like a tender mildew, lending a fragility to the hard surfaces and muting the colors that still shone through here and there—such as the dark brick red of the neighboring home, which we could now see, as if through a filter that simultaneously softened shapes and heightened them. Things then spoke to us with a more serious purpose, they gained deeper meaning, acquired a timeless symbolism. Nothing captured winter’s adamantine quality better than the beautiful Christmas carol that Miss Rappaport taught us: “… earth stood hard as iron, / water like a stone.” It was as if the world’s breath had stopped, and this rigidity struck us as a foretaste of eternity, when nothing would move or breathe anymore—only frightening at first glance, and festive as death at the second. We were completely taken by the white splendor, so full of promise, so powerful that it could turn any drop of water into a frozen star, that we asked ourselves whether a Christian who had never known winter would be capable of understanding why the Lord was born at this time of year and not in spring. Because in winter the world clearly became wider and freer; the horizons burst open. Bushes, trees, and shrubs that when in leaf merely simulated the depth of the landscape, like a forest backdrop on a stage, now turned transparent, while the gossamer branches and twigs, as spare as those inked on a Japanese brush-drawing, preserved the intact forms—just like the delicate spiderweb ribs of the maple leaf—and indeed it was this bareness that first brought the forms to light, by opening a view to the distance, from where, tinted orange as if in an eternal dawn, the heavens ascended.
On such days we weren’t allowed to stay outside for more than a short time, on account of the fierce cold. We played our way to the lance-leaf fence, gleefully drawing out the anticipation, as children so masterfully do, averting our eyes until the last possible minute in order to take in the sight of the slender row of shafts that enclosed our garden like a temple grove. And when we raised our eyes and looked through the veil of frost, woven with gold, we saw the hussar.
He was riding alongside a sleigh in which a woman was seated, wrapped in furs. His horse was beautiful: small, sinewy and stocky like Vernet’s Arabian stallions—so intensely portrayed in works such as The Lion Hunt, which we never tired of looking at—its eyes agape as if in horrified fury, revealing two white half-moons beside the soft, deep, black orbs, to create twin dangers, glassy and blinking, while its mane and tail fluttered luxuriantly frontward across the mirror-smooth chestnut brown of crest and neck and flank, as if artificially brushed for a coup de vent—swishing black hair, firm and silky and shiny, whipped forward in ample waves and wind-tasseled locks full of pathos and teasing drama—a beautiful picture of the equestrian art, of channeling the full power of the horse into the reins and into the hands of the rider … the wild mares of Diomedes must have been like that: the same theatrically bold pose in the face of the utmost horror, the fourfold drumming of hooves, rearing up at the shaft of the chariot as it plowed through the human corpses like the prow of a light ship.
The hussar sat very erect. He seemed no more than of medium height, in good proportion to his horse. His cornflower-blue uniform, with the wheat ears and gold braid, fit snugly. The high shako—which can give the impression of a slovenly, undisciplined, irresponsible band of soldiers more than any other head covering if it is crooked or tilted back over the forehead—was cut flat following the French fashion, and sat straight and square over his eyes, imparting a seriousness and severity that was reinforced by the short dark line of his trimmed mustache. This is not to say he had a severe countenance; in fact, his face was practically devoid of expression; I’m tempted to say it was artificially emptied. The result was an impassive, profoundly cool elegance that would have seemed dandyish had it not displayed a compelling inner resoluteness—the manly ideal from a supposedly bygone epoch, a world that had vanished—admittedly just yesterday, but all the more irrevocably!—a world of casually practiced elegant conventions, where female beauty was wrapped and bedded in billowy expanses of crinkly cloth, like the stiff tissue paper florists use on long-stemmed flowers, their hair pulled back into a calyx, from which jutted a tropical fantasy of dove and egret plumes glittering with clasps … the epoch of monosyllabic manly politeness, curt to the point of being almost contemptuous, of poses maintained with true sangfroid even in the face of death … Alongside his horse ran a pack of smooth-haired fox terriers, one with a limp that only showed at every other bound, as if the dog were too distracted to worry about his hind legs—presumably an example of the peculiar hysteria this long-unfashionable breed is susceptible to.
The woman in the sleigh had turned away from us, so we couldn’t see her face. But we weren’t curious about her face. We did not allow ourselves to be astonished or amazed, because what we saw—hussar, horse, dogs, and the woman in the sled with her face turned away, took place before our eyes, for no rhyme or reason, its splendor unique to the vision itself. In this way the scene was removed from time: it was pure image, and therefore a symbol—one we would never succeed in fully interpreting, of no importance, perhaps, except in the instance of its manifestation, when the mirrors of our souls were positioned to reflect it in a mystical, kaleidoscopic symmetry, like those rare moments when the sun appears at just the right angle and its rays break through the colorful rose window of a church and the monstrance glows with illumination. This is what I mean when I said that we knew the hussar. It only applied to this first sighting. The love that followed was an echo, just as all our love is basically a continued search for the fading echo of a call of secret recognition.
We very soon found out his name as well, because from then on we saw him over and over, although the empty days in which we were denied the joy of his sight often stretched out unbearably. Please don’t consider this exaggerated and extravagant. I think that every childhood has such secret passions, images in which we lose ourselves completely, with all our unbridled emotion, whether we encounter them in a person, a landscape, a book, or some object we may desire—and the chance of subsequent encounters lies outside our power. Perhaps life uses these images as lessons—to help us realize that the fulfillment of desire is not a matter of will, and to show us how much we are at the mercy of fate—or whatever other truths might be derived from the sheer power of incontrovertible truisms. In any case, back then we viewed our encounters with the hussar as the fervently longed-for proof of our special understanding with secret life powers, which, though it could only be established for a few moments, nonetheless consistently reinforced our belief in a higher reality of life; and the interludes between encounters, when our beautiful, courageous impatience gradually fermented into patience, seemed designed to lead us to insights, which, like all precocious knowledge, was filled with a sadness that shaped the foundation of our souls forever.
Never again would we encounter the same mythological procession of rider and lady, the sumptuously Baroque order, the sleigh gliding silently ahead alongside the whirling bustl
e of the dogs; the woman in the sled was no longer there, and in her place we most often saw his orderly, and so the days when the hussar rode by were tinged with a special light that lifted them out of the chain of the otherwise uneventful hours of those childhood days—idly frittered away, I’m tempted to say—and preserved their memory as sharply focused individual images in an otherwise inscrutable photograph. Undoubtedly it is always encounters like that, or rather the reencounters, which illuminate certain situations in all detail, like a flashlight, so that what we call memory is really just the recurrence of a few basic motifs, be they images or moods, in constantly changing configurations. Perhaps our soul is capable of little more than tracing the secret essence of these basic motifs through everything it encounters.
As I mentioned, we soon knew our hussar’s name, that he was Nikolaus Tildy, and that he was an officer in one of the cavalry regiments that had moved into the old, former Austrian cavalry barracks on the other side of the Volksgarten, following the occupation of our homeland. We were further delighted to learn that he lived nearby. Now and then we saw his orderly leading a horse into the barracks. We didn’t see the woman in the sled again until later, and then under distressing circumstances.
Meanwhile, something arose between our everyday existence and the world that had produced Tildy, which for us was automatically exotic and full of wonder—something that we interpreted as a secret connection.
In those days, our country’s elaborate, unwieldy approach to managing the economy kept a great many people busy. This was not because this system made our lives any more comfortable; rather it was due to a simple inability to think or even act economically—a failing, by the way, which despite all disadvantages did make our lives unforgettably rich in a way that has since disappeared from the earth entirely. For example, if a man offered his services without specifying precisely what these services might be, perhaps by boasting that he was strong enough to lift heavy objects, then no one questioned whether he was really needed but instead went about finding tasks for him to perform, once he had indeed demonstrated that he was as strong as he claimed. A maidservant was hired because she had made a nice and honest impression with her fresh red cheeks, her clean folk blouse, and her neatly combed hair—despite the fact that we by no means lacked for maids already. Another man found a position as a gardener because his face, bright with a simpleminded cheer and sunny to the point of saintliness, along with his gentle manner of speech, seemed clear proof of a green thumb. He was soon unmasked as an escaped convict and a particularly unscrupulous thief and was handed over to the police—much to our regret, incidentally, because we loved him dearly and wound up losing a great friend.
But such gaps were soon filled. And nothing could shake the attraction we felt for these people who contributed little in the way of service to our household but rather used it as a refuge and a playground for their peculiar idiosyncrasies—just like our poultry yard, which was filled with completely useless ornamental breeds of chickens and ducks, peacocks and pheasants—and we were rewarded with an abundance of experiences and exposed to a rich gallery of people, as colorful and aromatic as a bouquet of grasses and fresh meadow flowers.
Thus had we won the affection of a certain Widow Morar, a person of revolting, virtually monstrous ugliness, who was occasionally hired to help on the big laundry days, although she undoubtedly hindered more than helped with her boundless chatter. But she was a widow with three sons, and people generally pitied her. Everyone was in complete and unquestioning accord that she should be supported, and this had become a permanent arrangement, notwithstanding the fact that her sons were long grown up and gainfully employed—one even as a streetcar conductor—and that she was spending everything she earned on senselessly replacing some of her healthy natural teeth with gold dentures. Her husband, a drunkard, had shot himself.
Driven by a pathological need to communicate, she recounted this drama to us over and over, even bringing as evidence a chromolithograph of Christ, at once unsettling and profound, where a bullet had bored a perfectly circular hole the size of a coin right in the sealing-wax-red heart of the savior—his first shot, which had missed. Herr Morar had shot himself when he was in his cups, and spent a long time clumsily positioning his long military-issue rifle. He was unable to hold the gun with outstretched arms up to his temple. As a result, various projectiles had gone into the walls and ceiling, with him falling down each time in the process. Not until he placed the muzzle of his weapon in his mouth—“like a bottle” is how Widow Morar put it—while lying on his back, and using his big toe to squeeze the trigger, did he manage to kill himself. He had locked his wife and children in the next room; they were able to follow the proceedings through the keyhole.
This ghastly experience, which she could portray to few others so often and in such detail—and which appeared to have left her with an affinity for similarly shattering incidents, because she knew of further gruesome accidents, incurable diseases, and bloody crimes to relate—this experience made Widow Morar so attractive in our eyes that every time she showed up we would sneak away from whoever was watching us in order to get near her. Then she would treat us to macabre depictions that, far from repelling us, absolutely enthralled us, because they dealt with life’s darkest and least comprehensible riddle—death, which even in childhood seemed so close it verged on horror. But her attraction became utterly irresistible when we learned that Widow Morar also helped out at Tildy’s home. What’s more: she could boast of being a close confidante of Madame Tildy—to what degree this was true we will yet discover.
But back then could we have had any doubts? Everything about our hussar and the woman in the sled seemed so much like a fairy tale that we would not have been amazed at all to see these two mixed up in the strangest circumstances—and especially with a woman such as Widow Morar, whose mysterious ugliness made a mockery of any true human form, and put her in the company of djinns, ghosts, and demons from A Thousand and One Nights, not to mention her inner psychological connection to the eerie and the horrible.
In short, what we now heard about the woman in the sleigh, whose face we hadn’t seen, hardly helped bring our fantasies to a more down-to-earth reality. Her beauty was something we took for granted: we had never expected anything else. But just to have something concrete in mind, we asked: “How beautiful is she?”
“As beautiful as your doll with the bird,” said Widow Morar.
And of course we had known all along that she had some secret suffering—“a disease of the heart,” as Widow Morar put it.
“Can a doctor help her?”
“No, said Widow Morar, closing her eyes and smiling knowingly, almost happily. The fire of her gold teeth transformed her amazing ugliness into the mask of a shaman. No, it was not a sickness that could be cured by any human art or wisdom: Madame Tildy was born a Paşcanu.
That was news to us, though not surprising. Who else could the woman be but a daughter of the man whose celebrated rise to immeasurable wealth had made him as legendary as his wild life and, in the end, his grotesque downfall! Naturally, at the time we still had no idea about his touchingly ridiculous and dreadful end; we only knew his name from phrases that had become nearly proverbial: “Rich as Old Paşcanu,” or “a fox, a tiger, a wolf … a real Paşcanu.” Or else: “A peasant, a muzhik with no more manners than old Paşcanu,” and, finally, “as love-crazed as old Paşcanu.”
He had had a mausoleum built for his wife—a certain Princess Sturdza, the mother of Madame Tildy—in a small forest at Horecea, just out of town, modeled after the Taj Mahal. People said she lay there covered with jewels. But he also buried his mistress, a strikingly beautiful peasant girl with the common name Ioana Ciornei, right next to his wife. It was on her account that Princess Sturdza had died, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. People spread all kinds of rumors about the true purpose of the devotions he used to say at night, in the presence of both coffins, while his extraordinarily mean coachman, a castrato of
elephantine build, kept close watch on the building. In Romanian, “taci mahala” means “keep quiet, outskirts” and people found hidden meanings in the overlap of pronunciation.
“Does she see her father often?” we asked.
“Never. She hates him.” Widow Morar closed her eyes and gave a gleeful smile. “She despises him. She calls him her mother’s murderer.”
An Ermine in Czernopol Page 5