No one was ever able to explain what Tildy had in mind when he left the asylum and headed into town. The notion espoused by some that he meant to find Professor Lyubanarov in order to inform him of what had happened and to remind him of his duty as a husband is highly unlikely, given Tildy’s character. His motive for leaving will remain a riddle, a secret we didn’t need to unlock because we believed to understand its sense.
There was also much speculation as to whether Tildy purposely picked up a weapon or whether he always carried one out of military habit. To what special end he might have put it in his pocket was never clarified.
In any event, he went straight back into town. By then it was late afternoon; the pigeon-blue veils of twilight were still meshed together in the bright sky. It was the hour of the daily promenade. In the former Herrengasse, now renamed Iancu Topor Avenue, the patchkas of flaneurs were gathering. Tildy strode past them, bolt-upright, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed steadfastly ahead, until he reached the Trocadero, whose arc lamp was already lit. There, among his disreputable pack of friends, stood young Herr Năstase.
All witnesses agree that not a word was spoken. Năstase supposedly neither smiled nor laughed; in fact, not a trace of added irony could be seen in his naturally haughty and mocking expression. He simply stared blankly at the man wearing the upright travel hat, as did all the others who were standing there idly. And Tildy, who was in the process of walking right past him just as he did the others, suddenly took the pistol from his pocket and shot him right in the face. Năstase collapsed on the spot.
A dismayed hue and cry followed several seconds of horrified paralysis, but then something happened that set off a flood of raucous laughter — laughter that even as laugh-craved a town as Czernopol hadn’t heard for as long as anyone could remember, laughter that spread like the wind across the entire city and lasted for days, long after the rest of the story had played out: Năstase, who had been lying there, lifeless, started to move. With the help of his friends he pulled himself to his feet and stood there confused, wobbling on unsteady legs, blood streaming down his face and the back of his head, without knowing what had happened to him. He looked around at his friends who were propping him up, hoping for an answer. The bullet had hit the middle of his forehead one inch over the bridge of his nose and had exited through the back of his head and shattered the glass of the display featuring the lovely girls from the Trocadero, and nevertheless he was standing there, upright, and asking what had just happened.
The explanation was simple if unbelievable: Năstase had an unusually flat, backswept forehead. He also tended to carry his head at a proud height, tilted back on his neck. So the bullet had entered his forehead at such an acute angle that it glided along his skull without breaking any bones, just beneath his scalp, and came out several inches behind. At first glance it must have looked like it had passed through his brain without inflicting any damage. An anecdote as unheard-of as that made Czernopol howl with joy.
Several humorists were equally amused by the fact that in the general commotion no one thought to arrest Tildy. The surprised passersby, who had simply heard a gun go off but had no idea who had fired it, and who first directed their attention to the victim, would hardly have noticed the man marching calmly ahead. They must have expected to see someone running away, or already caught, and wondered where the man might be.
When a policeman was finally called to the scene, there was little he could do, first because of all the gawkers, whose backs formed an impenetrable wall and who had no idea what was going on themselves, and especially when the great laughing groan began to spread from the middle of the crowd. In short: Tildy went on his way unchallenged, past Kucharczyk’s Café and Confectionary, on to the Ringplatz, until by the time his name was mentioned and people started searching for him, he had disappeared into the ever-more-tightly-woven veils of twilight.
It remains to be determined whether his encounter with Professor Lyubanarov was by design or mere chance. Uncle Sergei assured us that nothing would have been more natural, even for a man as disciplined as Tildy, than to need a drink after having fired a presumably fatal shot. With that in mind, he stopped at the seedy dive near the train station — where he may have been heading in order to take the evening train out of town. It’s entirely likely that he knew the establishment from earlier days, and it was such a part of Lyubanarov’s daily routine that it’s highly unlikely their meeting was mere coincidence. But all of that is shrouded in mystery, as they say — and no new light was shed on the matter until Tildy was sitting with Lyubanarov and the story of his short and passionate love for Mititika Povarchuk began.
20. Love and Death of the Ermine
I AM AWARE that I am breaking all the rules of good storytelling by introducing a new character so late in my tale, especially insofar as she has an important role to play — that of my hero’s only beloved. But as I said at the very beginning, those of us who want to tell you stories are really simply always talking about ourselves, and in such a way that the stories become our stories—which doesn’t simply mean how we experienced them, but also the way they became ours in the telling. We were children when our heroes appeared to us as a vision, and we lost a wondrous world when we recognized its reality and when we realized it had died. And all we gained was the awareness of progressing one step closer to our own death. From that perspective, seen from the threshold of death, the figures that appeared last are the first: they cast their shadows over everything that went before — and so they were part of the story from the beginning, though invisible.
I am speaking about a girl Tildy met in his last night, in the dive near the train station. People say he loved her, and from all indications that was the case. We first heard about her after Tildy’s death, and didn’t lay eyes on her until much later. She was a streetwalker named Mititika Povarchuk. Around the train station she was known as “the American girl.” I want to describe her briefly.
She was very young — younger than she seemed at first glance; and there was no doubt she was extraordinarily pretty, even beautiful. But the delicate features of her face, the tender, girlish curve of her cheeks, her dainty nose, her alarmingly large gray eyes set so far apart, her magnificent chin and delightfully cut mouth were covered with a mask of makeup so rigid and artificial it was frightening.
“I am not exaggerating,” Herr Tarangolian once said to us, “when I say it took courage to look at her — in any case, more courage than is usually required to return a person’s gaze. Any type of mask is a reduction, an abstraction of the human face into its most general and most impersonal, elemental form, simplified into four fixed points: the eyes, the nose, the mouth. It is the utmost banalization of the human countenance, and, like all banality, it gapes at us blankly — with the emptiness of death. And death was clearly showing through the mask of this young prostitute: because a mask is not something that conceals; on the contrary, it reveals, it lays bare — which is why a mask is so erotic. The root of its demonic power, however, lies in the shamelessness, the horror of the lost face. The mask is a vessel turned inside out that can accommodate countless faces, though for just an instant, with no one face ever able to achieve permanence. From what I know about Tildy’s love — that is, from what I have managed to understand — it most likely consisted in fixing a face within the turned-out vessel of the mask, in other words, creating a content from the form. It must have been a heroic struggle against the horror that emerges from the banality of nothingness.”