Herr Alexianu went silent with a sullen expression. Whether he noticed how confused his speech had become, or whether he sensed some vague regret, that his ardor had somehow been displaced, perhaps because he made a careless mistake in once again referring to his great master Năstase at the most crucial moment — in any case, what he went on to say sounded bland in contrast to his earlier zeal. He had put away the shears and buried his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked off absently as he spoke, and he held his elbows pressed tightly to his side as if he were suddenly freezing.
“He really is a genius.” By saying “he” instead of “Năstase” he was conveying a certain distance: the self-identification had been broken. It seemed to indicate a diminishment, a falling-off, and this made us sad, just as Herr Alexianu’s voice seemed tinged with sadness. “He is the son of rich parents and became independent early on, because his parents died. He was able to live life to the fullest when others were still timid. He knows people’s secrets. For example, he distinguishes between two types of women, and claims to be able to identify each at first glance: the ones for whom, in the moment of greatest happiness, the man they are holding becomes only a male — in other words the ones who betray him, just when he is at the peak of his masculinity, with all other men of this world, and the others, who always mean this particular man they are holding and receiving and no one else, and who thus create the image of the male of the species in a mosaic-like fashion. He calls them the scientists, in contrast to the first group, the philosophically inclined women. But this is a deeper thought as welclass="underline" the loving individual always loses sight of the loved one as individual and only seeks that which is generic, only submits to the general ideal, just as we submit to the most general of all ideals — death …”
For a while no one spoke.
“He talks about all this, and similar such things, in front of women without the slightest embarrassment,” said Herr Alexianu, and looked at Fräulein Iliuţ as if he had been frightened by his first original thought of the afternoon. “And they love him. They all love him.” He took up the shears. “But as far as he himself is concerned, he refrains from any kind of reciprocity in love. And he does this consciously and intentionally. He calls it his form of monastic asceticism. It is part of his purity, his chastity, not to love. He despises the idea of si vis amari, ama. He says, and correctly, that it is the expression of a half-intellectual, an amateur poet courting the favor of the masses. No, not to love in order to create love, but to conjure love, to arouse love without getting mired in sentimentality — that is the noblesse of a new caste of Brahmins, and Năstase is one of them.”
Fräulein Iliuţ’s cheeks had turned a deeper shade of red. She now looked doggedly at her sewing, and we sensed what she, too, must have understood from Herr Alexianu’s peculiar lecture — and presumably from that alone: his secret penchant for cruelty, which drove him to seek chastisement. And although we loved her, and were filled with nothing but loathing for our tutor — the same deep-seated loathing we felt when he insisted on showing up our admittedly inadequate gymnastic attempts by dispassionately performing some acrobatic feat, ignoring the fact that he would stretch his tendons to the point of tearing or scrape his hands to the verge of bleeding — even though we were fully aware that he was behaving in a base and perfidious manner, that he was using a person who was utterly defenseless to still his desire, we were completely enthralled and took care not to diminish the spectacle by any slackening of our own undisguised curiosity. Because even if we were wrong in thinking that Herr Alexianu’s words were directed against us, we weren’t altogether mistaken, since our presence had undoubtedly provoked him to make a display of himself. Among the various experiences we had that summer — and not all were particularly happy ones — we learned that the best way of getting someone to reveal his true colors is to provoke him into showing his concealed disdain.
And so life started to become an adventure, in a way we had never known before. In fact, Miss Rappaport’s properly stiff and slightly sour departure — and we never saw her again — contained a grievance and a warning that was all too prescient. Because as the reliably tight and firmly established ring of obligations and activities, with which she had kept our attention focused on a few simple things, loosened, our sudden, unanticipated freedom finally opened the protective enclosure of our garden and released us on the city, bringing us in contact with its people and its spirit. And so Czernopol took possession of us. Once again it was only later that we realized what deep meaning may often reside in a chance nickname, and we had ample cause to regret the departure of our “Rock of Gibraltar.”
Still, the new experiences were not entirely without benefit for us. Because even if it was in many ways risky for us, at our age, to be made witnesses to the kind of dialogue that transpires behind a conversation — and what was behind Herr Alexianu’s words was clearly an act of rape — we were also repeatedly able to store away treasures within the cave of childhood that immensely enriched our imagination. The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association, something well beyond the logic that Miss Rappaport had insisted on with her determined patience. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us — for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexianu had also described as a kind of capacity, but to a name — in this case that of a certain Fräulein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with capers and capricious—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us — her name called to mind a jaunty Capricorn. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance overlap in pronunciation created the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word ekstase—ecstasy — in the name Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man’s tango-like essence.
For it was mostly names that provided our education with its richest nourishment, by lending essence to whatever ideas they were connected to, and thereby equipping various concepts with content. Our world was constructed from the names of people, landscapes, places, and buildings, and the words that surrounded them, and just as Herr Alexianu, following his grand master Năstase, had claimed, images were at the root of meaning and life. Nor were we ready for any degree of abstraction apart from thinking in images — which is what makes childhood expression so poetic — thus Tanya, inspired by Herr Alex — ianu’s lecture to speak in aphorisms, said: “The world is a door, and I am the keyhole.”