But then the following happened, and only now did the real Herr Alexianu emerge, so to speak, from behind the dampened cloth, which hung over his eyes like a partially raised visor:
When Tildy started to leave the room, Herr Alexianu happened to be standing in the doorway. And because he did not step aside quickly enough in order to let Tildy through — a gesture of respect, which, according to him, he had no special reason to show the major, based on what had transpired — Tildy gave him a resounding slap on the face, in front of everybody, taking the man so completely by surprise that Herr Alexianu had no chance to ward off the blow.
Herr Alexianu recounted this with Roman plainness, even greatness.
“Just as I am standing here with you, that man struck me. I am neither embellishing nor exaggerating. He hit me in the face. Without any cause, and quite unjustly. But that’s neither here nor there. I was hit in the face.”
He relit the cigarette he had previously extinguished and smoked it, albeit wincingly, one long drag after the other until he finished it.
“You can rest assured that Tildy would not have gotten that far if he hadn’t caught me off guard. Consequently there’s no need for me to be ashamed that he managed to hit me. Some of my friends jumped in to hold me back, but I made no move to pay him back right away. It is not my custom to fight in public. Those are peasant manners. Besides, he was in uniform and I respect the dress of honor more than some who wear it — and it has yet to be determined with what right they do so. I also said as much to Năstase, when he attempted to console me. I don’t need any comfort or consolation, I told him. Others may, but not me. ‘What are you going to do?’ Năstase asked me. ‘People will say you got your ears clipped at good old Mitică’s party. All right. But you should have picked a better occasion than old Turturiuk’s birthday. After all the man’s about to retire.’ Honestly I expected more from Năstase. And I wasn’t afraid to tell him that to his face, either. With all due respect for your intelligence, I told him, your jokes are often tasteless. So maybe your intelligence isn’t quite so high and mighty after all. Besides, Tildy raced out so fast it was impossible to follow him. He left the house at once. I for my part found no reason to do the same. It would have looked as though the incident mattered to me, as if I’d really taken a beating, if you know what I mean. It would have been the equivalent of confessing a bad conscience, which would have suggested that I somehow sensed I deserved to have my ears boxed — in other words, that deep inside I felt I had provoked it somehow. But none of that means anything, because it doesn’t apply — as interesting as it is to speculate. You see, I’m far enough above the incident to consider it from the point of view of an outsider and not a participant. At the same time, however, I’m not so removed as to not draw any conclusions. Yesterday morning, as I have since learned, Tildy challenged Năstase to a duel by sending his seconds. I myself spent the entire day at home, without their paying me a similar visit. Evidently he wishes to avoid getting seriously involved with me. Well, well, he’ll be hearing from me, this German …”
A few days passed before the excitement generated by Herr Alexianu’s report wore off. And because we didn’t dare tell anyone where we had learned about the events — else we would have been forbidden from paying further visits to the seamstress — Fräulein Iliuţ was the only one we could discuss them with.
We asked her: “What does it mean: to lose your face?”
Fräulein Iliuţ explained to us that it meant to fall out of one’s role, to be guilty of a shameful deed, or else to let something happen that doesn’t match what is expected of us.
We searched her eyes to find out what she was trying to conceal from us, but that really was all she knew, and she had no need to reassure us that was the case.
So she wasn’t a bewitched princess after all. She was never going to change back from a hunchbacked seamstress into her real figure. Because bewitched people are children’s allies. But she was just like everyone else; she, too, was part of the conspiracy of grown-ups bent on convincing children that words and things mean no more than what meets the eye, and that whatever they might sense and suspect beyond that meaning has no reality.
So the world was even more enigmatic than we imagined. And we were being kept from understanding it. And even Fräulein Iliuţ was part of the conspiracy.
Because what Fräulein Iliuţ told us could not possibly be everything there was behind such a phrase as to lose your face.
In this respect Widow Morar was much more part of our world. She had us repeat the phrase a few times, then closed her eyes and said, very slowly, her golden teeth glowing in the abysmal ugliness of her leathery, shamanic mask: “It means your face is completely extinguished. It means that something is going to happen that will wipe it away, the way a sponge wipes chalk off a slate — or someone wipes away what you’ve drawn on a misty windowpane.”
“But can you go on living without a face?”
“No. Then you have to die.”
“So how come it’s only then that you become human?”
“When you wipe what you have drawn on the windowpane, then the glass is clear.”
Incidentally, the next day we were informed that Herr Alexianu had been dismissed, and that we would have a few weeks’ vacation before being admitted into Madame Aritonovich’s institute.
7. Change in Perception of War as “Beautiful”
THE IDEA that Tildy would be considered a German struck us as so outlandish that we fretted over it for a long time — since in our childish gullibility we took everything at face value, accepting every hint of a possibility as cold hard fact — and led us to observe anything or anyone German more closely. Not without some hostile bias, it seemed at first, ultimately, though, it helped us discover positive qualities that would make it easier for us to accept the illogicalities if they ultimately proved true.
The fact that the Germans had been our comrades-in-arms during the war that had recently run its course and which very much still captivated our imagination, as well as the shared sense of defeat that weighed on our souls — not because we had to bear any consequences but because all our fervent wishing had proven powerless, and so the magical core of our faith in ourselves had been shaken — this had engendered a familial feeling for all things German, though it was not strong enough to drown out a closer kinship to our former opponents. Our family contained Italians and Russians whom we loved as Cousin Luigi or Uncle Sergei, although that didn’t stop us from viewing the cockerel-feathered Bersaglieri and bearded Cossacks we knew from the photos of the war as our enemies, but neither did it bring us closer to the men in feldgrau who had fought shoulder to shoulder with our own, men who always struck us as slightly wooden, and who never missed an occasion to proclaim how our military prowess paled before theirs. Naturally we inherited our mother’s Francophilia, which was shared by her sisters and seconded by Herr Tarangolian’s own passionate admiration for the French, for their art, the beauty and richness of their language, their fashion and their cuisine, and which had hardened into one of the preconceived judgments that youth, with its penchant for absolutes, is so quick to grasp, and which despite all later reservations continue to influence our life: the prejudice, for instance, that whoever didn’t speak French and wasn’t familiar with the French way of life was seen as provincial and uneducated and therefore of little account. The transfiguration in the expression of the men whenever the talk turned to Paris was in no way inferior to the depth of feeling summoned by our aunts when they spoke of Reims and Chartres, or Florence and Siena, and this led us to suspect that these cities would one day become our own places of pilgrimage, similar to the one our Polish cook took every year to the Black Madonna of Cze̜stochowa.