Herr Kunzelmann, who began his tireless activity early in the day, and was already making his rounds, came rattling up on the taradaika that was pulled by his brave mare Kobiela, and saw, as he put it, “a fine kettle of fish.” They loaded Tildy’s corpse onto the cart and slowly drove it up to the Ringplatz, while Kunzelmann sat on his box, holding a sadly drooping whip. The girl walked behind. Professor Lyubanarov had long since tapped his way back to the groove and was taking his usual way home along “the line.”
It fit the insatiable appetite of the city of Czernopol for dramatic effects that Tildy’s pitiful cortège on the Ringplatz collided with a pack of nocturnal revelers, led by Ephraim Perko, who had filled the Trocadero with his bubbly joie de vivre and was now on his way home, escorted by his friends and admirers.
“Tear out my heart!” he called, when he recognized the girl Mititika. “Now you are a widow? Viens avec moi, sweetheart, I’ll pay a thousand leos for the hour. No need to play the malakhamoves.”
And when the girl walked on without hearing him, he pursued her with a stubbornness his friends and admirers found highly entertaining, and raised his offer: “Two thousand, Mititikele, twenty-five hundred — can you hear and see! — three thousand, Mititika! … Thirty-five hundred. Going once, going twice … four thousand for half an hour! It’s time to pamper the kurvehs. Well, Mititika, five thousand!”
But the girl went on walking behind the little cart carrying Tildy’s corpse, unmoved. “My respects,” said Herr Kunzelmann. “That’s what I call character!”
There’s still so much I ought to tell you: how Tamara Tildy separated from Herr Adamowski, who later to our painful embarrassment married our Aunt Paulette, and how Baronet Wolf von Merores confessed the love he had long borne for Tamara Tildy in secret and showered her with luxury and all the trappings of a respectfully shy, melancholic chivalry till the end of her days, when she died as his wife, destroyed by her addiction, on the Riviera, and how Frau Lyubanarov came to a gruesome end during a spring storm in the little woods of Horecea when a wall of the Paşcanu mausoleum collapsed on her and struck her dead — some claimed it was during a tryst, others maintained she was searching for her mother’s jewels — and, finally, how Widow Morar of the golden mouth took in both of the half-orphaned Lyubanarov daughters after the professor wound up as a complete wreck in the municipal infirmary, and how in her macabre hands these girls blossomed into beauties who smiled their way through life as though through a garden. But that is another story.
Biographical Notes
GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.’’ After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monte della Corte. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (both published by NYRB Classics).
Philip Boehm has translated numerous works from German and Polish by writers including Ingeborg Bachmann, Franz Kafka, and Stefan Chwin. For the theater he has written plays such as Mixtitlan, The Death of Atahualpa, and Return of the Bedbug. He has received awards from the American Translators Association, the U.K. Society of Authors, the NEA, PEN America, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Mexican-American Fund for Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently he is translating Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel. He lives in St. Louis, where he is the artistic director of Upstream Theater.
DANIEL KEHLMANN is a widely translated German-Austrian novelist. He has won the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. He is a prolific author of fiction and criticism, and three of his novels — Me and Kaminski, Measuring the World, and Fame — have been translated into English.