The garden was protected from the street by an iron fence. A sandstone plinth extended out on either side of a small gatehouse — which we called the dvornik’s hut — up to the hedges of the neighboring properties. Tall, slender pickets rose out of this base and were connected by two long ribs; their pointed-leaf finials presented a straight row of beautiful lances whose form and order delighted us immensely. To this day I can physically sense the powerful magic that emerged out of the absolute symmetry of those lance-leafed finials, pulling us into its spell. And I don’t just mean the unbearable craving to heft and wield one of those spears, which were more perfect and more genuine than all those we had carved for play, but a desire that was unquestionably erotic, an urgency that was intensified by its sheer unattainability, similar to and no less pressing than the yearning felt later in life after possessing a woman we loved, and which despite the physical stilling — which always remains superficial — never achieves its true goal. But we were even more taken with the equilibrium this fence presented, the sparkling symmetry of picket upon picket, all coming together to form a single decisive perspective. And just as when we played inside we never tired of arranging our lead soldiers or other toy figures into the same undeviatingly square formations, so as to discover in their repeated regularity a magical geometrical essence that corresponded to mysterious structures within ourselves, so we were drawn outside to what was undoubtedly a very ordinary iron fence, with an emotion that verged on the sacred, because we sensed or suspected something in that line of pickets, something possibly close to the wellspring of ornament and dance and ritual.
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 beautifuclass="underline" 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.