At an advanced age he had decided to marry a lady who, though she lived in the capital, came from a highly unsophisticated background — a step which made him quite sympathetic but was hardly beneficial to his career in an army that had to catch up in matters of prestige, as well as everything else.
The time of Repin’s Cossacks, too, was nearing its end. In short, Colonel Turturiuk was standing on shaky legs in more than one sense, and he feared, not without reason, that the only reason for all the fuss was so that he could be sent off all the more quietly into retirement afterward.
As usual in Czernopol, this was a public secret, openly circulated by all and everyone. Of course the servants knew every detail of what was being provided, and how and where Madame Turturiuk had obtained the fancy food for the enormous cold buffet, and where the colonel had procured the wine and liquor — and they debated fiercely among themselves as to whether it was proper to borrow a neighbor’s bathtub to keep the suckling pig on ice. Similarly, Herr Tarangolian would sit in people’s living rooms and go over the list of invitees with malicious thoroughness, never stinting in his highly amusing explanations as to why each individual had been invited. The ball was staged on a scale that would give the city something to talk about for weeks and in the end did the colonel more harm than good by setting off a public guessing game concerning the source of funding.
As an active member of the national student fraternity Junimea as well as the Mircea Doboş sport club, Herr Alexianu had been among the invited, and, incidentally, this was the only known occasion when he made use of the socks that had been set out for him. He stayed through the entire affair from the very first minute to the very last, and didn’t show up at home until two days later, whereupon with head still throbbing he managed a hasty hour or two of lessons before repairing to Fräulein Iliuţ’s sewing room, where he delivered a detailed account of the evening.
In this way we learned more about the events that had already been rumored through the house and which had sparked our curiosity all the more because any questions were dismissed with a sentence or two.
Nor could Herr Alexianu resist whetting our curiosity to the point of torture; without paying the slightest attention to us, he turned to Fräulein Iliuţ and gave a colorful description of the ball, from the arrival of the guests to the high point of the evening, which, according to him, occurred after the military band — which played smartly enough, if a bit too briskly — was replaced by a group of Gypsies led by Gyorgyovich Ianku, who was quite famous in Czernopol at the time, and the more stilted members of the company had left. Only then, according to Herr Alexianu — in other words, only once the younger guests had won the upper hand and were able set the tone — did the fraternal and familiar atmosphere come to life such as the colonel had had in mind from the beginning. The older company lingered in the rooms on the ground floor, with the still-impressive remnants of the cold buffet. In the meantime the younger and more enterprising guests moved upstairs, where they could go on dancing, if they so desired, or spread out comfortably on the sofas to listen to the Gypsy violins in the muted light of the stained-glass lamps.
Perhaps it was on account of his headache that Herr Alexianu’s report failed to show off his usual stolid gymnastic determination, and was instead tinged with something brooding, unresolved, and even agonizing. For us, however, his depiction was so powerful we never forgot it. Summoning the atmosphere of those advanced hours, when the festive lights shifted into a mystical glow, he managed to conjure the night as it rushed along, with all its tender and awkward moments stirring amid the commotion, how the surfeit of light and color blended into a golden undulating fog in the blinded eyes of the partygoers, occasionally pierced by the musical rhythms slipping in and out of perception — when the overwrought and sensitized nerves take up a life of their own within the twirling bodies, a life that proceeds like a strange and deep conversation on a skittering vehicle, remote and yet unmistakably clear, when finally, as Herr Alexianu quoted Năstase, “man in his most advanced state returns to his cave, where he transforms the horrors of the world into religion”—in other words, when the hour of drunken melancholy sets in, in which loneliness, the inner cage from which there is no escape, “turns into desire and torment and consolation …”
Herr Alexianu even allowed himself to be carried away enough to describe the Gypsy fiddlers, “whose music weeps even when it’s joyful.” To relieve his headache, Fräulein Iliuţ had persuaded him to place a moist cloth on his forehead, so that his fanatical gymnast’s eyes stared out like the feverish gaze of a wounded soldier in the field hospital.
During this phase of the festivities, he went on, Major Tildy could be seen examining a picture hanging between two tapestries, with his uniquely unmoved and arrogantly expressionless manner — what might be called his “English” face — while Năstase and his friends were sitting with a few ladies on the sofas. The picture in question was the kind of enlarged photograph they sell at fairs, with an artificial background; it showed a peasant couple in traditional dress in front of a well, framed in unfinished birch twigs that overlapped at the four corners.
People were dancing in the next room. Gyorgyovich Ianku’s curly black head was visible through the open double doors, snuggled against his polished, chestnut-colored violin, rocking back and forth, utterly abandoned to the rhythmic swaying of a tango. The cimbalom player, who had a bean-sized purple-brown growth hanging from his lower lip, watched the tender intertwining of the dancing couples with olive eyes sticky with melancholy as his felted mallets raced over the strings, hammering out bewilderingly fast cascades of melody. Everyone had yielded to the magic of the very popular tango, and joined in on the refrain—“when the streetlights start to glow / and the evening shadows fall”—and consequently Tildy’s aloof manner, the unseemly attention he was devoting to the family picture, seemed conspicuous and somewhat offensive.
Colonel Turturiuk, a supremely cordial host who constantly encouraged his guests to eat and drink by setting an excellent example, himself noticed Tildy’s rigid and much too prolonged examination of the picture. With the tip of a napkin stuck in the opening of his full-dress uniform tunic, long since comfortably unbuttoned, carrying a full glass in his left hand and swinging a partially gnawed turkey leg in his right, he approached Tildy and addressed him, as Herr Alexianu reported, with a moving mix of good-natured annoyance and gruff reconciliation—“that kindness of character,” according to Herr Alexianu, “which blithely and directly dismantles the barriers of mendacious convention that serve to divide people, which is proof that our nation is truly still a child, and an expression of its admirably unspoiled character.”