We weren’t to learn until later that she was Tamara Tildy’s half sister — the daughter of Ioana Ciornei and old Paşcanu.
Another character who will play a role in my story was a young man named Năstase. We only knew him fleetingly, by sight. Our tutor, however, Herr Alexianu, happened to be one of his close confidants.
Herr Alexianu was hired when our parents could no longer bear Miss Rappaport’s sinus affliction — a kind of hay fever that always appeared in spring and afflicted her throughout the warmer months.
We were preparing to move for one more summer to the country, where we all ate together, unlike in town, where we children ate our meals with our governess. And our father’s irritation, his annoyed throat-clearing, the angry looks he gave our mother, seeking help and at the same time full of reproach, and the general nerve-racking silence whenever Miss Rappaport, with the heart-rending defiance of the desperate, would surrender to one of her excessive fits of sneezing and snorting — all of that only amplified the existing tension between the adults in a perfectly unnecessary way.
I can remember tumultuous scenes that filled the house with terror, and us with excruciating fear — outbreaks of a temporary insanity that first infected individuals before affecting all and sundry — precipitated by nothing more than a muffled “Excuse me” quietly uttered by Miss Rappaport, her eyes crimson and swollen and blinded by tears. This had the effect of focusing everyone’s attention on her for the fourth or fifth time during a dinner that had barely started, while she stuck her ostrich-like neck out even further than usual, her head swaying back and forth above her plate as if she had been struck blind and dumb by some enormous blow, and her buckteeth jutting out of her mouth with the expression of a dying horse, as if her skull were trying to peel itself out of its skin. As we waited for the eruption, keyed-up and anxious, Father hurled down his napkin, stood up, and left the table.
The ensuing silence was then saturated with a hostility that was not at all directed against Miss Rappaport, but rather set to spring like a trap, which anyone could trigger with the slightest clumsiness. And this tension grew into a painfully frustrated pleasure, when the compelling itch in our governess’s nose proved deceptive, in other words when Miss Rappaport eventually stopped her imbecilic head movement, opened her eyes as though surprised, blindly gaped around her in amazement, and finally let out all her pent-up air in one gigantic, convulsive sigh from deep within. Then she pulled her lips back over her teeth as best she could, and as her blotting-paper red eyes reabsorbed the well of tears brimming behind her thick glasses, she resumed spooning up her soup with model manners.
A single misplaced intonation or inept movement of the hand could unleash a distressing insanity that would spread all the way to the servants’ quarters, and this was most threatening and alarming when it went on behind closed doors, on the threshold of some catastrophic decision, as happens with people of unbridled temperament, who force themselves into conventional forms only to find their pent-up aggressive instinct festering into a blind rage. And even if we soon saw through the grown-ups’ theatrics — and we saw through them completely, recognizing that within those conventions they were resorting to artificially exaggerated emotions in order to stimulate their capacity for experience, which had been diminished or numbed by life — we realized that their histrionics were merely a way of mourning for what was irretrievably lost, although we ourselves were not so insensitive as to consider their pathos completely false and unreal. A sentence such as “So the only thing left for me is the pistol!” (punctuated by a carefully timed slamming of a door) never caused us a moment’s doubt as to whether the shot might be meant for Miss Rappaport and could free us from the cause of all discord, and the fear, with which we listened to the enormous silence that suddenly loomed in the house, mixed with a vague but painful sense of envy of Widow Morar’s sons, whom no one had kept away from the keyhole to witness the consummation of the catastrophe. Because even back then we sensed that nothing we might ever encounter, no matter how horrible, would frighten us more than what Herr Tarangolian called the horror of the literary existence—the void that engulfs us when we have too little actual experience. “Bear in mind, my young friends,” the prefect once told us, “that most people only know life from hearsay.”
In fact we wound up not leaving the city at all that year, so that everything could have stayed the way it had been. But it’s a well-known adage for the fickle-minded that the more you strive to avoid making decisions, the more likely you are to wind up with a weak alternative that — no matter how nonsensical — will become firmly entrenched, simply to release you from all other decision-making. And so a pretext was concocted, namely that our characters had had enough Anglo-Saxon development, and it was time that we acquire some solid learning to add to our knowledge that cats are able to fiddle and cows can vault the moon.
This goal was indeed achieved, although in a way that may not have been to everybody’s liking. And so, over the course of the summer, Miss Rappaport was given notice and Herr Alexianu was hired to replace her.
Regrettably, a tactless error tainted our relationship with Herr Alexianu from the very start. Somehow the idea had caught on in our household that private tutors typically had sweaty feet, and as a result a fresh pair of socks was set out daily for Herr Alexianu, who had moved in with a fiberboard suitcase full of books, two shirts, a gymnastics device, and a sheaf of love letters. He was obviously able to interpret this indelicate gesture and took his revenge on us by ignoring us completely outside the predetermined hours of instruction, when he treated us with iron strictness — as if we didn’t quite exist for him socially. This led to our having an abundance of free time we hadn’t expected, and weren’t accustomed to, and consequently to our discovering many details of the story at hand.
The main reason for this was that Herr Alexianu often spent his free time — when he was nonetheless confined to the premises — chatting with the household seamstress, Fräulein Iliuţ, in her little back room, where we also liked to go. Fräulein Iliuţ was a hunchback and beyond doubt the kindest and most likable character from our childhood.
The room where she sewed was always filled with a strong womanly scent, which was not the least bit unpleasant and was just as much a part of her as her legs, which seemed long in relation to her drastically shortened trunk, and her angelic head that was wedged between her shoulders. She had pretty, curly blond hair, and beautiful, remarkably lucid, eyes, and the fine-boned, somewhat emaciated face of hunchbacks — occasionally given to grimacing — as well as the delicate, spidery hands of the deformed. Apart from the hump between her shoulders everything about her was delicate, tender, and beguiling: her skin as well as her voice, her quick and quiet bustling, and the way her sadness dissipated into sunlit kindness. I clearly remember her gait, which was upright despite her humpback and in some unassuming way more determined than that of most people who had grown up straight. She was uncommonly dexterous and was a downright genius at piecing together something new from patches and remnants — just as she herself seemed fashioned from all sorts of remnants and remains of creation. She could bend her fingers — particularly her thumbs — amazingly far back at the last joint, and to our delight she would perform the “Great Mandarin of the Diamond Button,” using a Chinese hand puppet she quilted together at amazing speed, which we logically interpreted, without anyone ever having mentioned it, as a parody of the prefect, our fatherly friend Herr Tarangolian.