“Won’t he duel with any of the men he challenged?” We posed our question in all innocence but they didn’t understand that and dismissed it as inappropriate and silly.
That same afternoon, Frau Lyubanarov vanished from the gate.
“If you didn’t know who she was waiting for, day in and day out,” Widow Morar later told us, smiling with eyes closed in a state of ecstasy, as if blinded by the joyful truth coming out of her golden mouth, “if you didn’t know before, then now you do: he was the one she was waiting for. And every man that passed by was his herald. Because she has evil in her blood. She was conceived in sin and born and nursed with her mother’s hatred, the hatred of a common maid. She had to wait for him in order to annihilate him, out of hatred for the other who is her sister and is not her sister, a princess so delicate and so unique that in this world she is like a butterfly in a thunderstorm.”
But the strange thing was that our old friend’s oracular whisper now struck us as vapid. The biblical intonation, part curse and part annunciation, which used to cause our eyes to gape and filled our hearts with an almost holy awe, no longer held us in its spell. The monotony of her interpretations began to bore us. Their mythic oversimplification no longer sufficed to explain all the incomprehensible things that life now offered.
Another strange thing happened: our interest in the fate of our hero declined — or you might say became more abstract — just as his dramatic situation was approaching its pointed end. Much later, while reading Dorian Gray, we would be upset by a cynical remark of Lord Henry concerning the suicide of Sibyl Vane: namely, that he felt younger by years upon hearing that romantic gestures of that magnitude, which no one really believed people actually did, truly happened. Our experience was just the opposite, although it did not completely contradict that sentiment: namely, that living through a genuine drama only amplifies its incredibility; in other words: that the loss of reality stands in direct proportion to the intensity of the experienced reality. The appearance of Tildy shorn of mystery only touched us on the outermost surface because it was so irreversibly real; and in that same way, the news of his death and the circumstances surrounding it merely struck us as a distant echo. It took a long time for his story to become absorbed in us—a long time and much travel until we regained the wondrous world of the literary existence of our childhood.
As for Frau Lyubanarov’s disappearance from the garden gate, which would set off subsequent events, we heard yet other commentaries.
“Que voulez-vous?” asked Uncle Sergei. “The fact that she went after him is the most basic female psychology. He almost fought a duel on her behalf. What can convince a woman more about her man than his willingness to die for her? Read Leskov …”
Aunt Paulette, to whom he was speaking, remained unmoved for some time, and then said, slothfully: “Yes, I will read your poet in order to better understand women. But I think there’s a simpler explanation: He was the only one who never paid attention to her.”
“How so?” Uncle Sergei was getting worked up. “Are you saying that a man wouldn’t even notice the woman for whom he is willing to risk his life, not even with a small corner of his fantasy? Ah, chère cousine, you consider us men to be less coquettish than we really are.”
“No. I think you are every bit as exaggerated.”
“It only speaks for the unfortunate Major Tildy that he was willing to duel for a principle,” Aunt Elvira chimed in quietly. She didn’t have to swallow the rest of the sentence, since her meaning was written clearly on her face: “—and not for a woman like that.”
Conversations that we chanced to overhear — or, better put, monologues of this sort that were directed against each other — left us irritated, and we responded by being willful and recalcitrant. Against our great reluctance, they exposed us to the entirely new field of stupidity, full of hidden snares. We didn’t encounter the dangers they posed until much later, and even then it’s possible we never fully understood them.
Much later we had an opportunity to hear Herr Tarangolian’s view of the events back then. By that point he had long since removed himself from our world, so we had to remind him of certain specifics surrounding the case before he could recall it in any detail.
“You may rest assured that Tildy wasn’t the only one immune to the charms of this woman,” the prefect said, with dignity, adjusting the flaming red carnation in his buttonhole. “And of course there might be a kernel of truth in the theory that his evident indifference provoked her to follow him all the way to the asylum. But not much more truth than Sergei Nikiforich’s version or the one espoused by your macabre Widow Morar. Or even in the view of Fiokla Ignatieva, which, if I remember correctly, was far more plain and simple: namely, that no other man came down the street that afternoon. Believe all of it and none of it. In general, you should always believe everything and nothing at the same time. This formula is particularly recommended in psychology, which is the reason why that field is so popular, and why it is always correct in the general application and never in the specific case. So always take hold of the most obvious interpretation, while at the same time searching for the most remote.”
“And what would that be?” we asked, resigned to an answer we thought we knew in advance.
“If you’re asking for my own interpretation,” said the prefect, “it would be this: it had to happen, because it happened in Czernopol. Admittedly, there’s no logic in that explanation, but at least it has as much truth as all the others. Because no matter how much you might learn by studying a fateful chain of events: you can never escape from the notion of Providence—if you understand what I mean by that.”
He nodded majestically, taking his leave, and was about to turn to someone else, but then suddenly stopped us with his old, familiar smile.
“I often used to wonder,” he said, “what it really was you saw in Tildy. At times I thought I understood. I also thought I ought to warn you against it. Because what you presumed to see in him — or what you yearned for — is something, my young friends, that does not exist. Our vulgar world lacks the form that a human could adopt so perfectly that it would become transmuted into the heavy core of a magical force field. Those are legends, like that of the Grail, where the absolute ideal of chivalry is endowed with mystical significance. Very nice, of course, as a rough draft, a desired ideal — but only as a utopian one — in other words, as the hope of fools. At the same time”—and here the prefect’s expression became terribly contorted in the failed attempt to conceal his utter hatred behind a façade of joviality—“there is still a powerful difference between Percival, the savior, who is, in that he is, in coming, and a monomaniacal fool who pigheadedly opposes the world with his rigid principles. Clearly much was lost with the passing of the black-and-gold glory of the Austrian double eagle, much that we who are robbing its corpse, so to speak, mourn and miss. But the code of honor espoused by its booted and spurred cavaliers isn’t worth shedding any tears over. We can be thankful to Tildy for showing us exactly how ridiculous it was … Farewell, and please give my best to your esteemed parents.”