Herr Tarangolian took his leave, and remained in Czernopol for years, without ever revoking the legend of his imminent recall — and without renewing his former friendship with our parents’ household. From then on we saw him only rarely; he no longer mixed among the people like Harun al-Rashid disguised as an idle bon vivant. In time his appearance acquired a legendary quality: we would gape in wonder at our close friend from a long-vanished past whenever we happened to catch sight of him, driving by in his elegant black barouche, with the gleaming brass-crowned lanterns and the cinnabar whirlwind of spokes, the batman seated gruffly and martially beside the coachman on his box. And when once or twice he did appear on some extraordinary occasion in his full presence, it truly was as if he came riding in from some distant place, paying the honor of a special visit that seemed to demand appreciation. From then on he was removed from his old sphere into a new and higher one, and over the years he acquired an unusually high — and, for Czernopol, essentially unique — prestige. After that we never referred to him anymore as our friend, Herr Tarangolian, or even disrespectfully as “Coco,” but reverently, as the prefect. But later on, shortly before he left the city to become a government minister, he had become such a popular figure and public institution — a figure so steeped in legend it was impossible to imagine Czernopol without him — that the gently ironic nickname had become common currency. Even the newspapers took the liberty of referring to him as “Our Coco” in the headline of an article on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.
“Perhaps we should all let ourselves be ‘recalled,’” said Madame Aritonovich once — incidentally the only person he visited with any regularity, albeit at greater and greater intervals. “Because sooner or later the hour comes when our lives want to step into a new phase, completely of their own accord, and all previous connections are rendered null and void. Why not give fate a little help? One day all the old meadows are mown and we have to look for new ones — the same nomads we always were, incapable of cultivating our field.”
And as before, on the winter days when the prefect would come to visit and we would peep through the feathery patterns of the frosted windows as he climbed back onto his sled, eerily swathed in blankets and furs, and drove off into the white-and-gray snowy landscape — so now, with his parting from our lives, we felt the emptiness racing in, as though we had been abandoned to the merciless elements, to an all-powerful nature where humans, and with them all measure and order, had moved on, never to return.
19. Frau Lyubanarov Goes to the Asylum; Tildy shoots at Nâstase
WITH ITS profligate smile of spun light, which was both captivating and a little suspicious, like Uncle Sergei’s sentimental charm, autumn scattered its deceptive riches, dusting the profane tin roofs with its cheap gold leaf, and sprinkling its chromium-yellow, blue, and ochre-brown hues on the streets like confetti from a carnival, a parade of paradoxes — a motionless riot of color, a silent din, as dramatic as an attitude en pointe, and just as the ballet position becomes transformed by the cryptlike emptiness behind the sets, this autumn display acquired an unreal dimension, under the glass dome of the blue, silken skies where the crows were gathering.
Frau Lyubanarov stood at the garden gate day in and day out, filled by her own sweet idling, her sumptuous presence like a piece of fruit ripening away in some secret understanding with the late sun. We saw a man wearing a large gray hat enter our yard and pass her by; his posture was ramrod-straight, and he exuded a pallid, grim determination that seemed manic. Ruthlessly he passed through the force field of her honey-smile and emerged unscathed, then approached the house with decisive steps. The ingrained tautness of his bearing reminded us of the artificial vigor in the gait of our hunchbacked seamstress, Fräulein Iliuţ; the steady output of energy had become second nature by dint of cultivation and habit, just as her misshapen body had mobilized its reserves and developed unexpected powers, even a certain degree of grace. The tortured correctness of his clothing seemed provincial. His summer suit was tastefully understated in its cut and pattern, but its ironed surfaces and creases were so immaculate and pristine it looked like it had been hanging in the closet for a very long time. His smooth brown leather gloves were carefully buttoned at the wrists, and his broad-brimmed felt hat sat upright on his head with a defiant ponderous formality that showed through despite all intention to appear casual. A brooding earnestness and a knee-jerk pride — compensation for the visible discomfort with his own person — lent him an air of macabre absurdity. I caught myself thinking that it was the hangman in civilian clothes, en route to a quaint and wholesome little spa where he intended to spend his vacation — incognito, of course. Full of curiosity, we strained to see below the brim of the travel hat that had been arranged on his head with an angry attention to detaiclass="underline" it shaded his eyes and was underscored by the parallel lines of a vigorously trimmed mustache. Our gaze perceived nothing except for the impression of something alien, so far removed in time as to be anachronistic, or from another world entirely. And only after he had passed did we realize, more as a result of a slow, inner dawning than a clear and precise recognition—that it was Tildy.
Will it sound off-putting if I say that we weren’t the least bit dismayed to realize who it was? But this was not because our other image of the man had faded; on the contrary, it had long ago acquired a life of its own, inside us, unfettered from his person, forever free and independent — the hussar in his dazzling uniform that threw off sparks of blue and gold, his stallion and saber transforming him into a dangerous hornet, the menacing protector of his lady who glided alongside, at rest in the shell of her sleigh, the dogs dancing around like a pack of mythic guards … It’s true that this image had flashed by in an instant, straight into the enigmatic depths of the past, where it was entrusted to our powers of imagination before our eyes scarcely could take it in. But that doesn’t mean that it had become a dream with no correspondence to reality — no, that wasn’t the reason we remained unmoved when confronted with the actual man. In fact, it was precisely because we recognized him, because our vision of the hussar was a perfect, seamless match with the somber stranger in his well-preserved travel suit — that is to say, the reality was so convincing it left us no room for baffled amazement.
Because this reality was inherently transcendent, made plain to us by a gently persistent illumination, a dawning sobriety, which although it did not originate with this reality and in fact barely touched its skin, much less its core, did offer an intimation, like the distant echo of a sounding, that all reality occurs in this way: not merely in the sense that our expectations of life might find fulfillment — albeit only as it is granted or rather fated — so that we only acquire late in life what anticipation has long divested of its true value, but also because the reality never really affected us directly. However, even if the world was removed in a way that made it impossible for us to truly experience it, we nevertheless clearly felt how much it molded us from without, from outside ourselves. No refraction by the prism of perception can diminish the power of the events themselves. Tildy had come to talk to Aunt Paulette about his wife, since he knew our aunt was a friend of Herr Adamowski’s. Because Tamara Tildy had left the house in our neighborhood and moved in with Herr Adamowski.
Naturally we never found out anything about the conversation he had with our aunt. He left half an hour later and cut through the aura of the woman at the garden gate, his countenance unmoved, his back flat and straight as a board. Overcome with curiosity, we ran into the house and ascertained what we could. All we were told was that Tildy had finally been released from the asylum, but was going back one more time — presumably to fetch his things. As for his future, they simply shrugged their shoulders. Given the party now in power, there could be no talk of his being rehabilitated.