An Ermine in Czernopol (52 page)

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.

Only in such a dreamlike roundelay could Frau Lyubanarov's honey eyes lose sight of Tildy as they did, drifting deeper and deeper into that magical world of unmoored connections that also spawned the frightful thing that occurred. According to what we were later told about what happened next, the repercussions were too momentous for us to content ourselves with a sober chronology of events. We needed to delve further into the tale of our sad childhood hero, in order to understand what forever remained unspoken.

Plain and simple, what happened next was that Frau Lyubanarov did not follow Tildy into the building of the asylum, but kept on going to the large vegetable garden in back. And in the furthest corner, by the glazed cold frames and the early beds strewn with straw, a man was working all by himself in a dilapidated toolshed beside the wall—the insane locksmith, the “poet” Karl Piehowicz.

Tildy soon finished all the formalities and went once more to his protégé, perhaps to say goodbye, perhaps to calm the man down and promise that he would continue to look after him. He didn't find his friend at the vegetable beds, and since he heard some horrible gurgling and animal-like groaning coming from the toolshed, he rushed over there. We were only given embarrassed hints at what he must have seen there, and it took a long time before we understood—or, more precisely, before we found the courage to understand. Tildy saw the gruesomely contorted face of the gentle poet, gazed at the cavity of his foaming mouth, the mouth that had spoken to him of beauty, in humility and shyness and stammering with the rays of illumination, and whose tongue was now unleashing gurgling cries from behind his bared teeth. Tildy looked at the pitiful insane man in his frenzy. And in his arms lay Frau Lyubanarov, in rapture.

No one was ever able to explain what Tildy had in mind when he left the asylum and headed into town. The notion espoused by some that he meant to find Professor Lyubanarov in order to inform him of what had happened and to remind him of his duty as a husband is highly unlikely, given Tildy's character. His motive for leaving will remain a riddle, a secret we didn't need to unlock because we believed to understand its sense.

There was also much speculation as to whether Tildy purposely picked up a weapon or whether he always carried one out of military habit. To what special end he might have put it in his pocket was never clarified.

In any event, he went straight back into town. By then it was late afternoon; the pigeon-blue veils of twilight were still meshed together in the bright sky. It was the hour of the daily promenade. In the former Herrengasse, now renamed Iancu Topor Avenue, the
patchkas
of flaneurs were gathering. Tildy strode past them, bolt-upright, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed steadfastly ahead, until he reached the Trocadero, whose arc lamp was already lit. There, among his disreputable pack of friends, stood young Herr Năstase.

All witnesses agree that not a word was spoken. Năstase supposedly neither smiled nor laughed; in fact, not a trace of added irony could be seen in his naturally haughty and mocking expression. He simply stared blankly at the man wearing the upright travel hat, as did all the others who were standing there idly. And Tildy, who was in the process of walking right past him just as he did the others, suddenly took the pistol from his pocket and shot him right in the face. Năstase collapsed on the spot.

A dismayed hue and cry followed several seconds of horrified paralysis, but then something happened that set off a flood of raucous laughter—laughter that even as laugh-craved a town as Czernopol hadn't heard for as long as anyone could remember, laughter that spread like the wind across the entire city and lasted for days, long after the rest of the story had played out: Năstase, who had been lying there, lifeless, started to move. With the help of his friends he pulled himself to his feet and stood there confused, wobbling on unsteady legs, blood streaming down his face and the back of his head, without knowing what had happened to him. He looked around at his friends who were propping him up, hoping for an answer. The bullet had hit the middle of his forehead one inch over the bridge of his nose and had exited through the back of his head and shattered the glass of the display featuring the lovely girls from the Trocadero, and nevertheless he was standing there, upright, and asking what had just happened.

The explanation was simple if unbelievable: Năstase had an unusually flat, backswept forehead. He also tended to carry his head at a proud height, tilted back on his neck. So the bullet had entered his forehead at such an acute angle that it glided along his skull without breaking any bones, just beneath his scalp, and came out several inches behind. At first glance it must have looked like it had passed through his brain without inflicting any damage. An anecdote as unheard-of as that made Czernopol howl with joy.

Several humorists were equally amused by the fact that in the general commotion no one thought to arrest Tildy. The surprised passersby, who had simply heard a gun go off but had no idea who had fired it, and who first directed their attention to the victim, would hardly have noticed the man marching calmly ahead. They must have expected to see someone running away, or already caught, and wondered where the man might be.

When a policeman was finally called to the scene, there was little he could do, first because of all the gawkers, whose backs formed an impenetrable wall and who had no idea what was going on themselves, and especially when the great laughing groan began to spread from the middle of the crowd. In short: Tildy went on his way unchallenged, past Kucharczyk's Café and Confectionary, on to the Ringplatz, until by the time his name was mentioned and people started searching for him, he had disappeared into the ever-more-tightly-woven veils of twilight.

It remains to be determined whether his encounter with Professor Lyubanarov was by design or mere chance. Uncle Sergei assured us that nothing would have been more natural, even for a man as disciplined as Tildy, than to need a drink after having fired a presumably fatal shot. With that in mind, he stopped at the seedy dive near the train station—where he may have been heading in order to take the evening train out of town. It's entirely likely that he knew the establishment from earlier days, and it was such a part of Lyubanarov's daily routine that it's highly unlikely their meeting was mere coincidence. But all of that is shrouded in mystery, as they say—and no new light was shed on the matter until Tildy was sitting with Lyubanarov and the story of his short and passionate love for Mititika Povarchuk began.

I
AM AWARE
that I am breaking all the rules of good storytelling by introducing a new character so late in my tale, especially insofar as she has an important role to play—that of my hero's only beloved. But as I said at the very beginning, those of us who want to tell you stories are really simply always talking about ourselves, and in such a way that the stories become
our stories—
which doesn't simply mean how we experienced them, but also the way they became ours in the telling. We were children when our heroes appeared to us as a vision, and we lost a wondrous world when we recognized its reality and when we realized it had died. And all we gained was the awareness of progressing one step closer to our own death. From that perspective, seen from the threshold of death, the figures that appeared last are the first: they cast their shadows over everything that went before—and so they were part of the story from the beginning, though invisible.

I am speaking about a girl Tildy met in his last night, in the dive near the train station. People say he loved her, and from all indications that was the case. We first heard about her after Tildy's death, and didn't lay eyes on her until much later. She was a streetwalker named Mititika Povarchuk. Around the train station she was known as “the American girl.” I want to describe her briefly.

She was very young—younger than she seemed at first glance; and there was no doubt she was extraordinarily pretty, even beautiful. But the delicate features of her face, the tender, girlish curve of her cheeks, her dainty nose, her alarmingly large gray eyes set so far apart, her magnificent chin and delightfully cut mouth were covered with a mask of makeup so rigid and artificial it was frightening.

“I am not exaggerating,” Herr Tarangolian once said to us, “when I say it took courage to look at her—in any case, more courage than is usually required to return a person's gaze. Any type of mask is a reduction, an abstraction of the human face into its most general and most impersonal, elemental form, simplified into four fixed points: the eyes, the nose, the mouth. It is the utmost banalization of the human countenance, and, like all banality, it gapes at us blankly—with the emptiness of death. And death was clearly showing through the mask of this young prostitute: because a mask is not something that conceals; on the contrary, it reveals, it lays bare—which is why a mask is so erotic. The root of its demonic power, however, lies in the shamelessness, the horror of the
lost face.
The mask is a vessel turned inside out that can accommodate countless faces, though for just an instant, with no one face ever able to achieve permanence. From what I know about Tildy's love—that is, from what I have managed to understand—it most likely consisted in fixing a face within the turned-out vessel of the mask, in other words,
creating a content from the form.
It must have been a heroic struggle against the horror that emerges from the banality of nothingness.”

By the time we encountered the girl Mititika Povarchuk, she had entirely lost her face. Hers was a doll's mask, its beauty displaying all the cheapened and distorted features of some banal fashion, not one of them unique.

But when she met Tildy, her mask was presumably still full of the promise of countless faces. According to the fashion of the times, she kept her face framed between a nearly brimless hat that was pulled far down, and a high, flattering collar that reached up nearly to her cheeks. Her pot-shaped hat seemed to enlarge her head and shrink her body, and as a result her rigid mask of makeup gave her a childish appearance. She wore her hair short, with two curls under her hat clumsily and coyly teased across her temples. Her narrow shoulders were hunched together as if they were cold and seeking warmth in her collar, and her eyes seemed timid, lost, and distraught, appealingly bashful: her doll-like appearance concealed a nymph poised for flight. But then again she was all siren—dangerously and even triumphantly aware of her own allure. The timorous way she clasped her collar beneath her chin called to mind a woman attempting to cover her breasts when surprised naked. Her elbows angled sharply into her body, pressing her garment to her skin so that it offered no protection. Her dropped waistline hardly suited her knee-length skirt; it lengthened her torso and shortened her hips, and what was meant as a mincing step on her very high, thin heels was clumsy and ponderous despite all her svelte enthusiasm, and made her look like a wingless bird with a human head. On top of that, her hands were unusually ugly. They must have suffered frostbite at one time because they were bluish-red, with brittle, chapped skin and ruined cuticles, from which her long, painted nails grew out crooked, like claws. Her voice, too, was raw, cackling, and shrill. She was Ukrainian and hardly spoke more than a few words of any other language. The rough, thudding speech came as a surprise from her mouth, which despite all the makeup was still that of a young girl, so that at first she was difficult to understand.