Nevertheless, this was the same countryside that looked to Czernopol as its capital, and a few things in my story might be clearer if I offer you a brief description.
“The Province of Tescovina, which is comprised of Tertiary Hill country rich in loess, has no natural eastern defenses and lies exposed to the Podolian Steppe, so that for thousands of years the land was subject to the invasions of barbarian nomads.” That was the sentence we had to commit to memory as one of our first lessons in local history and geography under Herr Alexianu, who worked for a while as our private tutor — one part of our very checkered and highly unsystematic education. The purpose was to acquaint us with the idea that running through our veins was the blood of Dacians, Romans, Gepids, Avars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Slavs, Magyars, Turks, Greeks, Poles, and Russians: “a strong mix of ethnicities” was how the book described Tescovina. In the fourteenth century some landed gentry, whose names struck our ears like the curses we were always hearing — Bogdan Siktirbey, for example — founded small states, known as “voivodates,” which soon came under Turkish rule. In 1775 the Sublime Porte ceded our homeland to Austria, which first annexed Tescovina to Galicia, and later declared it an independent Crown Land. Herr Alexianu spoke about this historical episode with the greatest reluctance.
And yet that chapter had irrevocably shaped the face of the country — at least for the time we lived there. The late-summer sunsets still reflected the glory of the sunken Austro-Hungarian Empire. Broad, tranquil country roads still cut through the vast expanses, bulwarks of official sobriety restraining a landscape drunk with melancholy, “roads from the time of marching and express post,” straight as an arrow, drenched with sweat and powdered with dust “like ribbons of military twill” … roads lined with mighty poplars, where falcons perched in treetops flickering in the wind — the gasps of a gigantic breath that refused to be checked by a few silly barriers recently sprung up along the border … roads quietly bending in the distance, toward faraway places yearned for by the plaintive, minor tones of the shepherds’ pipes.
In the small market towns the bleached black-and-yellow of the Dual Monarchy still lingered on the tollhouses and state monopoly signs, conjuring echoes of the high-pitched calls of the garrison bugle, long since faded, floating over the colorful rural hustle and bustle as a reminder of the transience of worldly power, like the symbol of imperial sovereignty on a Flemish painting of a census. Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers, with all their overheated drama. As it turned out, these new rulers, too, succumbed to the charms of a grand imperial waltz, just like their predecessors, and in its blissful thrall let all the overheated drama dissipate in the plot twists of Countess Maritza.
But landscapes are like people, and inside every face marked by the life already lived lurks another face, which has always been there, and which is destined to reveal itself in time: the face of their future.
And so the passing seasons brought startling changes to the face of Tescovina. The first gusts of snow blew in unexpectedly from the east, smacking of Asia, and fell on the magnificently protracted blue-and-gold autumn like the hordes of Pechenegs once must have descended upon a Byzantine palace whose columned halls shimmered with cloisonné. Faster and faster it fell, its fury rising into a biting storm that raged for weeks, rending the land to reveal an expanse indescribably more vast than the one veiled behind the tender yellow-and-violet late-summer sunsets, and which promised sparkling cities that towered like Montsalvat, mountains like those of Altdorfer, and happily smiling shores. The new face of the land gaped open like a monstrous yawn; its pull was powerful and sapped at the marrow.
We experienced it most directly through the change we noticed in our beloved Herr Tarangolian, during his occasional visits to our parents. In the summer these were always very pleasant occasions: the prefect would arrive in a coach accompanied by a pair of pretty Dalmatians that ran between the rear wheels. Herr Tarangolian was only moderately tall, but portly, and there was something undeniably imposing about him, especially when he stepped out of his shiny lacquered Victoria coach. He would lean on the shoulder of the batman who escorted him everywhere like a bodyguard, and as he shifted his weight, the carriage springs would first squeeze precariously low, then snap back up when his foot, in a shoe as shiny and black as the carriage, stepped off the foot-iron. But the official pageantry of his first appearance quickly evaporated, erased by an oddly passé foppishness and ridiculously exaggerated manners. The prefect dyed his mustache and his bushy eyebrows coal black, and, in contrast to the gray, close-shorn stubble on his head, they looked as if they had been pasted on, which gave him the rather implausible appearance of a stage magician. His pearly, perfectly regular teeth seemed so obviously false we were always afraid he might lose them, or, even worse, that they would declare themselves independent and start snapping of their own malicious accord while he was kissing some lady’s hand, which he did freely and with great frequency. But they were genuine, as were his eyebrows, which moved independently back and forth on his forehead, like two fuzzy black caterpillars, lending elegance to his expressions. At least their thickness was genuine, and undoubtedly their color had once been genuine as well. His blackened mustache was no less authentic, for although its delicate ends were teased out with unbelievable meticulousness, they were spun from the strong hair that really did grow from under his bulbous nose.
In fact, everything genuine and fraudulent about Herr Tarangolian seemed transposed in an amusing, if rather unsettling way, so that what was fake seemed convincingly real, and what was real smacked unpleasantly of fraud. Perhaps this had something to do with his mesmerizing histrionic talent. He could mimic a person or a common personality type with a mere shift of countenance; he was fluent in all languages, reproducing dialects to perfection, and he neither hoarded nor squandered these talents, but utilized them judiciously to further enliven his sparkling conversation without the slightest embarrassment. He was a master of banter and wit and possessed a brilliant mind; his descriptions were striking and his logic compelling, and we loved to hear him talk, even if back then we didn’t understand half of what he was saying. He also enjoyed having us children nearby, and was always very attentive and caring, pampering us with presents and winning us over by treating us on an equal footing, as grown-ups.
Perhaps the prefect’s overstated politeness, his exaggerated attentiveness, and his general fussiness, which at times bordered on the ridiculous, might incline you to underestimate him. Nothing could be further off the mark.
I still recall exactly how he smiled as he once held forth on the subject of understanding human nature. “We turn to psychology in the hope of recovering what we’ve lost in the way of direct observation of our nearest and dearest. But the way we go about applying the concepts of this science, it’s as if instead of using everyday knives and forks, we set our table with forceps and surgical scalpels. No wonder we cut our own lips … Someone was recently explaining the theory of compensation to me, which reduces ambition to the manifestation of a secret inferiority, thereby diminishing any aspiration to greatness. But what if the opposite is true? What about someone who is utterly and unquestioningly convinced of his superiority, but comes to the logical conclusion that if he is to live with others he cannot advertise how superior a being he is — would that be an example of what we call Christian humility? … I don’t think so,” said Herr Tarangolian, and his smile became theatrically diabolic behind the mask formed by his mustache and eyebrows — three thick black lines above his perfect teeth and heavy eyes. “No, that would be a heathen way of reasoning. In a Christian world such a realization has to camouflage itself, hide behind the ambiguous pose of the fool or the clown, so it can be passed off without provocation. Dealing with people, my friends, is really nothing more than a question of the price that one is willing to pay. The better you understand life, the more capital you build.”