That was our last meeting with the prefect, and it took place at a fête that Madame Aritonovich gave to celebrate the tenth-year anniversary of the Institut d’Éducation; she could hardly foresee that it would soon be shut down under pressure from the nationalists, because she was a Russian. So we once again found ourselves among our friends from that brief episode when we had been her pupils. To be sure, Blanche Schlesinger was missing: shortly after the night of the “Petrescu-pogrom”—as the unfortunate events were called — her father had been called to Heidelberg, and she was living with him there. She had written to us how extremely happy she felt in Germany; for the first time in her life she felt free from fear. Sadly, after just a few letters back and forth the correspondence trickled out. But now I want to tell without interruption what happened on the day Tildy came to see Aunt Paulette, and in the following night:
Tildy had returned to the asylum, presumably to take care of the formalities regarding his dismissal, or perhaps to spend a few more days there, since he had no roof over his head, as the saying goes. In any event Frau Lyubanarov followed him, whatever her motivation.
I’ve often pictured the two of them on their way: the landscape at the edge of town, a belt of fields opening onto the vastness steeped in melancholy, and the figure of the man, in his stiff, ramrod-straight, tin-soldier daintiness, marching unwaveringly ahead, followed at some distance by the woman in her colorful knit peasant blouse, moving in a lazy saunter, swaying her beautiful hips, her topaz gaze fixed ahead, lethargically and dreamily, an aster stem between her teeth, barely touched by her lips. I imagined her passing the gardens with no apparent purpose, as if the sweetness of doing nothing were pulling her into a violet-blue Somewhere. I pictured her lazy, voluptuous gait in front of the bizarre architecture of the Feuers’ house, whose absurd Nordic ornamentation seemed practically Chinese, and I perceived the melody of both, that of the house and the woman, a Nouveau Arts and Crafts Wagnerian motif together with a flute theme distilled into ever higher spheres of sensuality — both tinged and intertwined with the sounds of a Jewish fiddle shifting between major and minor keys in a resigned, ironic melancholy, bowed by an old beggar who sat in the dust of the curb on the outskirts of town, in front of the poor simple little houses that looked as though they had been constructed by schoolchildren, with white-and-yellow walls, their pitiful lamps emerging against the pigeon-like blue of the twilight and igniting within ourselves our common forlornness, and the great sense of humility that entailed: an old man offering his poverty to God, rendering his meekness in tones and colors; a blind man whose smile was turned inward, whose pallid skin was patinated with hunger and verged on pistachio green, whose archaically and beautifully curled iron-gray sidelocks cascaded below the brim of his cracked and worn lacquered Galician cap, trimming the threadbare violet of his old coat with the sumptuous purple of inalienable human dignity. And in my mind I also always added the distant stamping of the musicians on the dance floors in the outlying districts, drifting on the wind, as they filled the tedious emptiness of a Sunday afternoon playing their music for homesick soldiers and their girls: the endlessly repeated and monotonous rum-ta-ta which now and then was drowned out by a single trumpet like a cock’s cry that faded with the frailty of all yearning, giving way to the dull, muted explosions of the cymbals amid the double basses and drumrolls. In later years nothing came so close to recalling the city of Czernopol as this image composed of themes, colors, and sounds — and movement that was deeply meaningful and extremely sparse. It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams or drafts.
The large and repulsively desolate brick building of the asylum lay strictly isolated toward the front of large area that stretched back toward the open country and was enclosed by a wall taller than a man. I can still clearly feel our horror at discovering the razor-sharp bottle shards embedded in the mortar of the top of the wall, apparently to hinder people from climbing over. At the same time, the entrance gate was constantly open, and it was hard to guess which of the people loitering about and chattering the day away might be the gatekeeper. Later we learned that it was never shut at night, either. Why should it be? The dangerously insane couldn’t be let outside without supervision, and the harmless crazy people who worked in the garden or helped out in the kitchen were said to be as used to their surroundings as pets and showed no inclination to leave. Of course one could only imagine what took place behind the securely barred windows of the cells inside. We had always contented ourselves with a glance through the gate at the sober, rectangular barrack with bricks of an unhealthy, almost feverish red that reminded us of the shades of scarlet in the raw meat at butcher shops. Still, there was something pleasantly dapper about the sharp contours beneath the flat tin roof, and when we looked further, to the plain rows of vegetable beds, we saw men dressed in the gray uniforms of the institution moving about — their figures made tiny by the perspective, just as the entire grounds seemed smaller and more distant, and all appeared neatly isolated, as if we were looking backwards through a telescope, or as if they had been painted with the dilettantish precision of so-called Sunday painters, as part of a daintified scene for a raree-show. It was exciting first to imagine Tildy entering the toylike simplicity of the enclosure with his unwavering tin-soldier march, shrinking as he stepped further away, a tiny particle of the whole, until he suddenly disappeared inside, swallowed up as if he had never belonged anywhere else but there and had only gone out for a brief walk, and then to picture Frau Lyubanarov pushing her way inside, bringing the hitherto still diorama into motion with her golden, swaying gait, causing the sleepwalking figures to dance around her peasant beauty so full of life, their faces tilted toward heaven, their eyes agape like seers, as they sought to follow and fix the odd thoughts and random insights that darted around their heads like magpies, occasionally responding with a blinding, empty laugh or a black storm of anger that was quickly sent off into the void.
Only in such a dreamlike roundelay could Frau Lyubanarov’s honey eyes lose sight of Tildy as they did, drifting deeper and deeper into that magical world of unmoored connections that also spawned the frightful thing that occurred. According to what we were later told about what happened next, the repercussions were too momentous for us to content ourselves with a sober chronology of events. We needed to delve further into the tale of our sad childhood hero, in order to understand what forever remained unspoken.
Plain and simple, what happened next was that Frau Lyubanarov did not follow Tildy into the building of the asylum, but kept on going to the large vegetable garden in back. And in the furthest corner, by the glazed cold frames and the early beds strewn with straw, a man was working all by himself in a dilapidated toolshed beside the wall — the insane locksmith, the “poet” Karl Piehowicz.
Tildy soon finished all the formalities and went once more to his protégé, perhaps to say goodbye, perhaps to calm the man down and promise that he would continue to look after him. He didn’t find his friend at the vegetable beds, and since he heard some horrible gurgling and animal-like groaning coming from the toolshed, he rushed over there. We were only given embarrassed hints at what he must have seen there, and it took a long time before we understood — or, more precisely, before we found the courage to understand. Tildy saw the gruesomely contorted face of the gentle poet, gazed at the cavity of his foaming mouth, the mouth that had spoken to him of beauty, in humility and shyness and stammering with the rays of illumination, and whose tongue was now unleashing gurgling cries from behind his bared teeth. Tildy looked at the pitiful insane man in his frenzy. And in his arms lay Frau Lyubanarov, in rapture.